of the Gheologicns Soy 


PRINCETON,N. J. 


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CHRISTUS AUCTOR 


A MANUAL OF CHRISTIAN 
EVIDENCES 


BY 


WARREN A. CANDLER, DD ED, 


fOURTH EDITION 


| NEW YORK 
THE BAKER & TAYLOR CO. 


33-37 EAST SEVENTEENTH STREET 
UNION SQUARE, NORTH 


CoPpyRrRiIGuHt, 1900, 


By WARREN A. CANDLER, D.D., LL.D. 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER 
INTRODUCTION . : : f s ; 
I. CHRISTIANITY OFFERS CREDENTIALS. 


it. 


1 i be 


VI. 


VII. 


VIIl. 


THE EVIDENCES. THE REASONABLE 
USE oF REASON . i ; A e 


ASSUMING THE EXISTENCE oF A Gop, 
THE ANTECEDENT PROBABILITY OF A 
REVELATION : : . s 


Is THERE A Gop? ATHEISM, AGNOSTI- 
CISM, DEISM, PANTHEISM AND RE- 
VEALED RELIGION 2 4 ‘ 


HAs Gop APPEARED AMONG MEN? Is 
JESUS A MyTH? : a A 


Has Gop APppPpEARED AmMona MEN? Is 
THE JESUS OF THE EVANGELISTS 
DIVINE? y . ‘4 : ; { 


Has Gop APPEARED AmMona MEN? Dip 
JESUS RISE FROM THE DEAD? St. 
PAUL’s TESTIMONY 4 - f . 


St. Pauw’s Testimony ConTINUED AND 
ITS CORROBORATION BY THE EXISTENCE 
OF THE CHURCH AND BY THE HISTORY 


OF CHRISTIANITY (' ., : ‘ p 


HAs Gop APPEARED AMoNnG MEN? Dip 
JESUS RISE FROM THE DEAD? THE 


PAGE 


1-8 


9-16 


17-28 


29-38 


39-56 


57-68 


69-88 


89-104 


TESTIMONY OF THE EYANGELISTS , 105-124 


¥ 


1D.¢ 


XI. 


XII. 


XIII. 


XIV. 


Contents 


Has Gop AprpreaRED AMONG MEN? THE 
WITNESS OF HISTORY TO THE DIVINITY 
OF JESUS 


WHEN Gop Was Amone Men Dip HE 
APPROVE ANY SACRED Books? THE 
WITNESS oF JESUS TO THE OLD TESTA- 
MENT 


Wen Gop Was Amone Men Dip HE 
PROVIDE FOR ADDITIONAL SACRED 
Books? WHat AuTHorITy DOES THE 
New TESTAMENT DERIVE FROM JESUS? 


HAVE THE SacrED Books AUTHENTI- 
CATED BY GoD WHEN HE WaAs 
Amonc MEN REACHED Us IN A Sup- 
STANTIALLY UNCORRUPTED STATE? 


Is THE IMPRINT OF Gop Upon THE Book 
AUTHENTICATED BY JESUS? THE IN- 
TERNAL EVIDENCES OF THE DIVINE 
ORIGIN OF THE BIBLE. ‘ A 


THE CONCLUSION . : A - Z 


. 125-148 


. 149-174 


175-206 


. 207-226 


227-240 
241-250 


INTRODUCTION 


“Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto 
you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to 
write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earn- 
estly contend for the faith which was once delivered 
unto the saints.”—St. Jude. 


“Stand fast in the faith.”—St¢. Paul to the Corin- 
thians. 


“That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to 
and fro, and carried about with every wind of doc- 
trine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, 
whereby they lie in wait to deceive. But speaking 
the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, 
which is the head, even Christ.”—-St. Paul to the 
Ephesians. 


“Nor will the Higher Criticism disturb the conclu- 
sion of our common sense. It has run its course and 
perished in the counter-currents of its own antago- 
nisms. Acids and alkalies of hostile theories have 
neutralized each other. Opposing electrical forces 
have adjusted themselves into equilibrium. The sky 
is cleared by its own violence, and we may once 
more discern plain truth by plain reason.”—John 
McDowell Leavitt, 


i a 


INTRODUCTION 


Braise Pascar in his Penscés has left frag- 
mentary materials for an apologetic treatment 
of Christianity, which he hoped to have made 
the work of his life. For so great a task he 
declared ten healthy years were required, 
while God had given to him only four sick 
ones. 

For more than twenty years, as the writer of 
these lines has had opportunity, he has pon- 
dered the Evidences of Christianity and stud- 
ied many of the masterpieces of the literature 
of the subject. But they have been busy years, 
crowded with toil and care, which denied him 
the leisure, if he had possessed the capacity, 
required for attaining the learning necessary to 
a just presentation of even the outlines of the 
great argument. 

From the standpoint of an amateur in apolo- 
getics, however, he has felt the need of a trea- 
tise in which the Evidences of Christianity 
should be presented in a different form from 
that of any with which he was acquainted. The 
older writers have seemed to take too much for 
granted, and besides, since their days the field of 
controversy has been entirely changed. Not a 


few of the modern writers, on the other hand, 
5) 


4 The Policy of Concessions 


have appeared to grant too much and to make 
concessions to rationalism which may be justly 
regarded as scarcely less than betrayals of 
truth. 

This modern policy of concessions to ration- 
alism, made in the interest of what has been 
called “a distressed faith,’ is unwise and un- 
necessary. It must be resisted and reversed, or 
a devouring criticism, having mutilated and 
mangled the Holy Scriptures, “the Oracles of 
God,” will presently proceed to an attempt to 
discrown and dethrone even the very Christ of 
the Prophets and Apostles himself. For, as 
Bishop Ellicott truly forewarns the Christian 
world, ‘The same spirit that has found irrecon- 
cilable difficulties in the supernatural element of 
the Old Testament will ultimately challenge the 
evidence on which the Incarnation rests. And 
the more so as all the age-long testimonies of the 
Old Testament, all the foreshadowings of all 
the promises that were greeted from afar, all 
the sure words of prophecy, will have been ex- 
plained away; and there will remain nothing 
save two narratives, which, it will be said, bear 
so patently the traces of illusion, or, at the least, 
of an idealism expressing itself under the guise 
of alleged facts, that the doctrine of the Word 
become flesh, the doctrine which is the hope, 


1Bllicott’s “Christus Comprobator,” page 11. 


A Stand Must Be Made 5 


light and life of the universe will be surren- 
dered to the last demands of what will have 
now become not a distressed, but a ruined 
faith. When that blessed doctrine is surren- 
dered, the total eclipse of faith will have com- 
menced and the shadows of the great darkness 
will be fast sweeping over the forlorn and deso- 
late soul.’” 

Already indeed a tendency is observed in cer- 
tain quarters “to minimize the knowledge of 
our Lord in His human nature,’”” and to set up 
a plea of nescience for Him in order to offset 
his testimony to the authority of the Hebrew 
Scriptures, to the end that the assumptions of 
a destructive criticism may not be embarrassed 
by open and undisguised conflict with Him 
while still calling him Lord. 

Against all this mistaken movement of theo- 
logical compromise a firm stand must be made, 
if a shred of Christianity is to be left for trans- 
mission to the generations to come, or even if 
the faith of the present generation is to be main- 
tained. At this present moment over wide 
areas of Christendom there are visible the char- 
acteristic parasites of a dying religion— 
mistletoe growths, such as Mormonism, Spirit- 
ualism, and Christian Science. Unless the 


“Christus Comprobator,” page 31. 
*Ibid., pages 85-96 and 97. 


6 Christianity or Superstition, Which? 


influence of recent “destructive criticism” 
is speedily overcome the Christian world must 
prepare for an age of the most grotesque super- 
stitions. It can not return to paganism—the 
gods of the heathen world are dead beyond the 
hope of resurrection. But after it has re- 
nounced the guidance of the Bible, it will be 
forced to follow the lead of a blind but death- 
less instinct of religion into an era of ghosts 
and goblins. When the God of Samuel has 
been forgotten, having been dissolved in pre- 
cipitate and corrosive speculations of “redac- 
tions’ and “redactors,” the witch of Endor 
will be resorted to, or mayhap multitudes will 
fly to the superstition of an infallible Pope, 
to whom John Henry Newman filed in order to 
down the spectres of his own raising. When 
in riotous rationalism Christendom has wasted 
the substance of a rich revelation inherited 
from the ages past, the prodigal will awake 
amid a famine—“a famine not of bread, but 
of hearing the words of the Lord”—and will be 
forced to starve, or to join himself to some cit- 
izen of the far land whither he has heedlessly 
wandered. 

Forefending against a calamity so great, a 
stand must be made around the person of Je- 
sus. His authority must be made the bulwark 
of the faith “once (once for all) delivered to 


“Ohrist the Central Evidence’ q 


the saints.” As the Reverend Principal Cairns 
has truly said: “In the great struggle between 
faith and doubt the key of the position is the 
person of Christ himself, and so long as the ob- 
vious meaning of the Gospel narrative as to 
the life, character and work of that central fig- 
ure can be accepted ‘as fact and not delusion,’ 
no weapon lifted against Christianity can pre- 
vail.”* Jesus is the true Defender of the 
Faith. He is the refuge of Truth in this “age 
of doubt,’ as he hath been its “dwelling place 
in all generations.” 

From the standpoint of this confident belief 
have been written the pages which follow. No 
claim of originality is made for what is con- 
tained in them. Most of it can be found scat- 
tered throughout the apologetic literature of 
our own and other lands. It is, however, here 
brought together in a form of argument not 
hitherto adopted by the evidence writers, as 
far as the present writer is acquainted with 
them. The strength of the discussion is in the 
method of its structure, and not in the original- 
ity of its materials. 

It is put forth in the hope that it may steady 
the faith of some and restore the confidence of 
other wavering souls, and thus honor Him 


*“Christ the Central Evidence of Christianity,” 
page 1, in “Present Day Tracts,” Vol. I. 


8 The Standpownt of this Writer 


“whom the glorious company of the Apostles, 
the goodly fellowship of the Prophets and the 
noble army of the Martyrs praise; whom the 
Holy Church throughout the world doth ac- 
knowledge; who is the King of glory, the Ever- 
lasting Son of the Father.” Unto Him be 
glory and power and dominion “throughout all 
the generations of the ages of the ages!” 


I 


CHRISTIANITY OFFERS CREDENTIALS. 
THE EVIDENCES. THE REASONA. 
BLE USE OF REASON 


“Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.”— 
St. Paul. 


“Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the 
spirits whether they are of God: because many false 
prophets are gone out into the world.”—St. John. 


“Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst 
thou find out the Almighty unto perfection?”— 
Zophar the Naamathite. 


“We must enlarge our mind to the magnitude of 
divine mysteries, not limit them to the narrowness 
of our understanding.”—Lord Bacon. 


“The last step of reason is to perceive that there 
are infinitely many things which surpass her; and 
if she does not attain this knowledge, she is weak 
indeed! ”—Pascal. 


“The whole compass and system of the Christian 
Evidences unquestionably has nothing like it, nor ap- 
proaching to it in the annals of the world. Itisa 
phenomenon standing alone.”—Davison, 


I 


CHRISTIANITY Orrers COreprentiats. THE 
Evivences. THr REASONABLE USE oF 
Reason. 


CHRISTIANITY alone of all the religions which 
have challenged the faith of man approaches 
him as a reasonable being, offering credentials 
of divine authority when demanding his gub- 
mission. There are Evidences of Christianity, 
but there are no Evidences of Buddhism, Brah- 
minism, or Mohammedanism. 

The Evidences of Christianity are the proofs © 
by which its claims to be accepted as the revela- 
tion of the only true God are attested. 

Evidences appeal to reason, and Christianity 
submits its Oredentials to the scrutiny of 
reason, insisting that the investigation of its 
claims shall be carefully and even severely 
conducted. It would not have men renounce 
the use of this God-given faculty in dealing 
with the highest and most solemn interest of 
life—religion. On the contrary, it demands 
that men shall employ reason, that spurious 
revelations may be exposed, the true faith es- 
tablished, and the genuine revelation correctly 


interpreted. 
it 


12 Credentials, Not Contents, Considered 


But while demanding the use of reason, 
Christianity insists that reason shall not be 
used unreasonably. In seeking to ascertain if 
God has made a revelation to man, and if so, 
what that revelation means, investigation can 
not be too severe. In determining this great 
question of fact, no room must be left for de- 
lusion or fraud. But in settling this ques- 
tion the credentials and not the contents of the 
revelation are under consideration. The 
hypothesis of a revelation is, that it is given to 
impart knowledge which the unaided reason is 
unable to discover. It begins where reason 
falters and fails. “It is therefore to be expect- 
ed that it should communicate some truths not 
to be fully comprehended by the human under- 
standing. But these we may safely receive 
upon the authority which declares them without 
danger of violating truth.” ‘We have a right 
to sit in judgment over the credentials of 
heaven’s ambassador, but we have no right to 
sit in Judgment over the information he gives 
us.”” It is an unreasonable use of reason to 
reject a revelation in whole or in part, because 
its contents do not accord with some a priort 
notion of what it ought or ought not to contain. 


*“Theological Institutes,” by Richard Watson, Vol. 
I., page 1138. 


*Chalmers’s “Evidences of Christianity,” Vol. II., 
page 445. 


{ 


An Absurd Use of Reason 13 


Before the authority of reason may be justly 
allowed so enormous an extension it should be 
shown that the human mind is able to construct 
a philosophy of the Infinite, and formulate an 
ethical system perfect enough to test divine 
purity. But if human intelligence were com- 
petent to achieve successfully so great a task 
the necessity of a revelation would not exist. 
If such were its power, long ago men by search- 
ing would have found out God, and without a 
word from above they would have known the 
Almighty to perfection. But the human reason 
has no such power. Such use of it is unrea- 
sonable, for it makes the human mind _ the 
standard of the possible, the true and the good, 
and that too in the very moment of its confes- 
sion of weakness and insufficiency. Such a use 
of reason is “as absurd as a man’s making his 
visible horizon the limit of space.’” 

To the contents of a revelation human reason 
may not do more than apply the general tests of 
natural theology, viz.: that the revelation be 
consistent with itself and with the axioms of 
thought within which mental life and action are 
possible at all; that it be not immoral but con- 
sistent with the ends of holiness, for which only 
a revelation can be conceived to exist; that it 


’Charles Hodges’s “Systematic Theology,” Vol. L., 
page 50. 


14 Reasonable Tests of Revelation 


be adapted to the wants of man as a free, moral 
agent, not commanding his obedience without 
sufficient evidence that the command is from 
heaven, nor constraining his obedience by 
coercive proofs that would leave no room for 
freedom of thought and of action. These gen- 
eral criteria Reason is under the most solemn 
obligations to Truth to apply with the utmost 
care and caution. Before by these tests it de 
nounces a revelation as absurd, immoral or 
superstitious, it must be sure that its attitude is 
entirely judicial, and not that of a defendant in 
the dock pleading against the jurisdiction of the 
court and the validity of the law which threat- 
ens his condemnation. All disturbing influ- 
ences arising from intellectual pride, mental 
waywardness, or moral eccentricity must be 
severely excluded while the credentials of that 
which claims to be a message from heaven are 
scrutinized. 

The office of reason in religion we conclude 


is to determine the following questions, and 
these only: 1. Has a Revelation come from 
God? 2. If so, where is it? 3. Having found 
it, what is its real meaning ? 

In the settlement of these questions the proc- 
esses of reason can not be too severe or too 
painstaking. These matters are issues of life 
and death. They affect the life that now is 


Reason’s Office and Duty 15 


and that which is to come. They touch duty 
and destiny. They are too great for trifling, 
too far-reaching for man to incur any risks of 
mistake by renouncing reason, or by employing 
reason unreasonably. On the peril of his life 
he must pass upon them reverently, seriously, 
sincerely, and settle them for time and for 
eternity. 

He can not after the manner of the Roman- 
ists transfer this responsibility to an Infallible 
Pope or to Infallible Councils. They are but 
men ashe isa man. No sanctification, or ordi- 
nation, or aggregation, of fallibility can ever 
produce infallibility. Every soul must bear its 
own responsibility, and enjoy its own freedom. 
There is no room for the office of an attorney be- 
tween any man and God. Every man must 
find and accept God’s truth for himself. 

On the other hand, he can not after the man- 
ner of the Rationalists undertake to revise 
God’s revelation, or to reject it, because of any 
preconceptions of his own. He must settle these 
great questions of fact upon the evidence which 
lies before him. If he finds as a matter of fact 
that God has made a revelation, he must obe- 
diently receive it, and he must reverently seek 
the true interpretation of it. He must earn- 
estly inquire, has God made a _ revelation? 
Where is it? What does it mean 2 


16 The Questions Herein Considered 


The last of these questions belongs to the 
science of  interpretation—Hermeneutics— 
with which the pending discussion is not con- 
eerned. The first two include all that is in- 
volved in the Evidences of Christianity— 
Apologetics—and are the matters considered in 
the investigation which follows. 


| 
| 


II 


ASSUMING THE EXISTENCE OF A GOD, 
THE ANTECEDENT PROBABILITY 
OF A REVELATION 

2 


“As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so 
panteth my soul after thee, O God.”—Psalmist. 


“O that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou 
wouldest come down!”—Isaiah. 


“Oh that I knew where I might find him! That 
I might come even to his seat. . . . Behold, I 
go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I 
can not perceive him: On the left hand, where he 
doth work, but I can not behold him: he hideth him- 
self on the right hand that I can not see him: but 
he knoweth the way that I take.”—Job. 


“Tf He has, or rather is a Heart; if the moral quali- 
ties which are discoverable in ourselves have any 
transcendent and majestic counterpart in Him; then 
supposing the question whether he has given a revela- 
tion to be for us still unanswered, or even unexam- 
ined, we do well to traverse all the corridors of his- 
tory, to take counsel with the current wisdom and 
experience of the living, and to cross-question the re- 
corded convictions of the dead, until we see reason 
to hope that a solution is at last at hand; until ‘the 
day dawn and the day-star arise in our hearts,’ ’— 
Canon Liddon. 


TL: 

Assumine THE Existencr or a Gop, tHe ‘An- 
TECEDENT PROBABILITY OF A REVELA- 
TION. 

THERE is no God; there is a God, but He has 
made no revelation of Himself to man; there is 
a God and He has made a revelation of Him- 
selftoman. The foregoing are all the hypothe- 
ses possible to the human mind on the subject 
of God and a divine revelation. The alterna- 
tives of thought are therefore some form of 
Atheism, Deism, Pantheism or Revealed Re- 
ligion. No account need be taken of any phase 
of Agnosticism, for it excludes itself from con- 
sideration at this stage of the discussion by its 
non-committal attitude on the question of the 
divine existence. We are assuming the exist- 
ence of a God—which Agnosticism affirms is 
unknown and unknowable. 

For the present we assume there is a God, 
and raise the question, Is it probable that he 
has made a revelation of himself to man? 

All the forces of Deism and Pantheism, by 
whatsoever name called, answer with one accord, 
No. Is this answer reasonable ? 

If we think of God at all we must think of 


Him as infinitely powerful and infinitely good. 
19 


90 Atheism Better Than Deism 


Impotence or evil we can not attribute to Him 
by whom all things were made and do now ex- 
ist. But if He is both good and powerful He 
will not leave such a creature as man without 
all the light required for life and happiness. 
In the benevolence of God and the needs of 
man lies the antecedent probability of a revela- 
tion. As Canon Liddon says, most truly: “If 
we really believe God to be a Moral Being, we 
shall be prepared to find that he has spoken to 
us. The strength of the confidence with which 
we anticipate a revelation will vary exactly 
with our faith in the morality of God.” And 
Atheism is less repugnant to reason than belief 
in an immoral God, or in a God morally neutral. 
It is more reasonable to believe that there is no 
God, than to believe that there is a God, and 
that he has left such a being as man, beset with 
the circumstances of sin and pain and death, 
without a word of guidance amid conditions so 
tragic and so perplexing. Man’s origin, duty 
and destiny present problems, the solution of 
which vitally affects his welfare, but lies quite 
beyond his natural powers. 

God’s creatures of the lower orders, the 
brutes, having instinct to guide them, and being 
incapable of the sin and suffering possible to 
man, do not need and could not receive a di- 


*“Some Elements of Religion,” page 205, 


Deism and Pantheism Unreasonable 21 


vine revelation. That they are without such 
supernatural guidance does not impeach the 
divine goodness. But man is appointed to 
a higher and more perilous position. To him 
is given the lofty and dangerous faculty of 
free agency, with all the possibilities of dread- 
ful failure or glorious success. To him light 
from above is as needful as the air is to the fowls 
that fly, or as the water is to whatsoever passeth 
through the paths of the seas. If he be left 
without a revelation from God, no argument 
can clear his Maker of the charge of cruelty. 
Deism, which claims that there is a God but he 
has not revealed himself, puts an “immeasura- 
bly greater strain upon faith’” than Christian- 
ity with all its miracles. And the attitude of 
Pantheism as to a revelation of God is essen- 
tially the same as that of Deism, with this dif- 
ference, that the latter believes in a silent God 
outside the world, ‘“‘banished”’ from his crea- 
tion, while the former claims a dumb God, who 
is “only a fine name for the universe,’” beneath 
which he is “buried.” Human nature and hu- 
man needs cry out against such gods. 

But it may be asked, Is an objective revela- 
tion necessary for man, and is the necessity for 
it such as to create the presumption that it has 


“The Foundations of Faith,” by Rev. Henry Wace, 
A.M., page 58. 
*Liddon’s “Some Elements of Religion,” pages 63-68, 


22 Isa Written Revelation Probable? 


been given? Isa written revelation probable ? 
May not reason, conscience, the light of nature, 
and the divine influence which lighteth every 
man that cometh into the world, be sufficient 
to meet his needs? Men have been in the 
world certainly as long as sixty centuries, sin- 
ning, suffering and dying, and most of them 
have had no written revelation during all that 
time. Not less than twenty-five hundred 
years of the age of man elapsed before the books 
of Moses and Job were written. If a written 
revelation is necessary, why was its beginning 
so long delayed, and why was it not given in 
full at the outset? Why is the written revela- 
tion not universal? Why should millions sit 
in the region and shadow of death waiting for 
the light to reach them by the tardy compassion 
of the favored nations to whom were first com- 
mitted the oracles of God ? 

A perfect answer to all these questions it is 
not possible to give. Such knowledge is too 
high for us. It is enough to say that the anal- 
ogies of Nature would lead us to expect a rev- 
elation to be given to some in trust for the ben- 
efit of all. There is no equality of gifts, natu- 
ral or supernatural. High ends of benevolence 
and brotherhood are doubtless served by send- 
ing the greatest blessings to all men by the 
hands of some men. Moreover, the purpose and 


The Best Revelation for Man 23 


plan involved in the existence of free moral 
agency must not be set aside by the method of 
a revelation, since the only object of a revela- 
tion is the moral well-being of the race. The 
means must be shaped to accomplish, and not 
to defeat, its own end. The question is not 
what God can do in the abstract, but what He 
can do in dealing with a free agent, having pur- 
posed that creation should reach its goal in 
virtuous free agency. The hypothesis of the 
divine goodness and the divine omnipotence 
does not require a method of revelation that 
should be best for some possible being. It re- 
quires the best form of revelation for the actual 
being, Man. A good God must not only give 
to his child, Man, light, but he must give the 
best light in the best way, Man being such a 
creature as he is. 

There are but three methods which God 
could adopt in making a revelation to man: 
1. Reveal himself independently to each man. 
2. Reveal himself to one or more men, and have 
the revelation transmitted to all others orally. 
8. Or make a revelation and transmit it from 
the few to the many by written as well as spoken 
words. Which is the best ? | 

If God should adopt exclusively the first 
method, he must reveal himself to each man by 
unmiraculous suggestion and influence, or ap- 


24 Revelation Must Be Public 


proach every man with impressive phenomena 
attesting the immediate presence of Deity. If 
the revelation were given by unmiraculous sug- 
gestion it would incur the peril of being un- 
heard and unheeded. Moreover, since in such 
a case every man would hear for himself alone, 
with no other eye to see the divine presence, 
and no other ear to hear the divine voice, de- 
pravity might without the fear of detection re- 
port falsely the divine utterance. Presently 
the world would be filled with contradictory 
revelations, mutually destructive, and every 
vestige of true religion would be Swept away by 
a flood worse than all the polytheisms of the 
ages. By such a method men would extend the 
confusion of tongues at Babel, and confound 
the speech of Deity. God himself would be 
made to appear polyglot, and monotheism would 
give place to polytheism. No fair tower of 
faith between heaven and earth would then be 
possible, nor city of God among men. A reve- 
lation to be of any use must be public, not pri- 
vate and personal. 

On the other hand, if the divine approach to 
each man were publicly attested by miraculous 
manifestations, theophanies would become so 
common and universal that they would cease to 
have any power to impress man or attest the 
divine Word. Or they would come with such 


Oral Tradition Inadequate 25 


manifold terrors as to overpower the will and 
destroy free agency. In either case all the 
ends of revelation would be defeated by the 
method of revelation. 

Clearly, therefore, the needs of man fix the 
method of divine revelation. Mercy to all re- 
quires that the revelation be given to the few, 
and the solemn obligation of giving it uncor- 
rupted to the many be laid upon the men who 
receive the divine communications. It is 
equally clear that human instinct, as well as 
divine impulsion, would inevitably lead to 
the committing of these revelations to writing. 
The piety that would commend one to God 
as a proper medium for a revelation, as well 
as the divine authority which gave the revela- 
tion, would forbid exposing the heavenly word 
to the chances of oral tradition. The degen- 
erate faiths among men to-day witness to the 
student of comparative theology how ineffectual 
is tradition to preserve the Word of the Lord 
against human corruptions. The common rule 
of evidence, which excludes hearsay testimony, 
points to the unreliability of statements trans- 
mitted by word of mouth, and shows how little 
authority a revelation resting exclusively on tra- 
dition would have among men. 

“The man with a book” is looked for and 
longed for in all lands. This universal demand 


26 “A Book Religion” Required 


for a written revelation has produced the al- 
most universal supply which we see in the 
Zend-Avestas, Vedas, Korans and Bibles of 
the world. The contribution by the Jews of 
their sacred books, their only contribution to 
the permanent possessions of the race, has set 
them apart among the nations in sublime sin- 
gularity as a “lonely people with their lonely 
book.” And the majestic purity of their faith 
amid world-wide superstition attests the supe- 
rior value and power of a written revelation 
over all oral tradition. 

From the foregoing considerations, the dog- 
ma of Deism, that God has not made a revela- 
tion to man, does not seem reasonable. The 
presumptions of reason arising from man’s 
needs and God’s goodness are all against it. 
Assuming the existence of a God, the antecedent 
probabilities lead us to expect that somewhere 
and some-when he has made a revelation to man, 
and that it has been committed to writing. 
None but a “book religion” seems to satisfy the 
requirements of man’s need. To use the clear, 
cogent words of a learned theologian: “The 
presumptions in favor of a divine revelation ex- 
tend to its commitment to writing. No one 
would trust an important communication, de- 
signed for all men and all time, to uncertain 
oral tradition. Everybody knows how un- 


A Book Religion or Constant Miracle 27 


trustworthy are all unwritten anecdotes and 
memorabilia. How few of the reputed sayings 
and acts of Moses and the prophets, of Christ 
and the Apostles, outside of the Scriptures have 
come down to our times, and there is not one 
of them entitled to credit! We should there- 
fore naturally expect that if God revealed his 
will to prophets and evangelists, he would in- 
struct them not only to make oral communica- 
tions of them to the people of their own age, 
but also to commit them to writing, under the 
infallible superintendence of the same Power 
by whom they were revealed. Unless a con- 
stant miracle were wrought to keep the truth 
alive in the world, and preserve it unalloyed 
with error, its commitment to writing is the 
only conceivable method by which this end can 
be secured.””* 

But once the truth is committed to writing, 
and the writing has been accepted as a revela- 
tion from heaven, no miracle will be required to 
preserve it from corruption or from perishing. 
Pious zeal maybe relied upon to multiply copies 
of it, and an unmiraculous Providence may be 
trusted to protect the work of the consecrated 
zeal to which has been entrusted the miraculous 
communication. The God of Providence and 


‘Dr. Thomas O. Summers’s “Systematic Theology,” 
page 438. 


28 The Book His Peculiar Care 


the God of Inspiration are not two Gods, but 
one, and we may be sure the one true God will 
not in his providential government of the world 
abandon the work of his own hands. His Su- 
pernatural Book will be the subject of his pecu- 
_liar care. Nor will He need the extraordinary 
-means of miracle to preserve it. Miracle He 
will use to attest it in its origin, but the faith 
and love which it calls forth, together with 
his providential oversight, will be sufficient for 
its perpetuation. Hereby it will be so fixed that 
though heaven and earth pass away it will not 
pass. 


Wy 


IS THERE A GOD? 


i 


“For the invisible things of him from the creation 
of the world are clearly seen, being understood by 
the things that are made, even his Eternal power and 
Godhead.”—St. Paul. 


“The heavens declare the glory of God; and the 
firmament sheweth his handywork.”’—David. 


“For in Him we live and move and have our be- 
ing.”—From St. Paul’s address on Mar’s Hill. 


“That God is, all nature cries aloud.”—Cato. 


“So far is it from being true that the explanation 
of phenomena by natural causes leads us away from 
God and His Providence, that those philosophers who 
have passed their lives in discovering such causes can 
find nothing that affords a final explanation without 
having recourse to God and His Providence.”—Lord 
Bacon. 


TTL 


Is Turrr a Gop? 


- Uwxiess we accept philosophical scepticism 
and deny the possibility of all knowledge of 
every sort, we know that we are, and that the 
universe around us has a real existence. Our- 
selves and all things demand an explanation of 
their being, and we are compelled to give one 
of three explanations: (1) Matter and mind, 
as we know them, are Eternal; (2) Or they 
are the last effect of an infinite regression of 
causes; (3) Or there is a great First Cause 
from which all things have issued. 

Tt will be observed that the conceptions of 
the Infinite and the Eternal are involved in 
each and all of the three hypotheses from which 
we are forced by the laws of thought to select 
an explanation of the problem of being. It 
has been often assumed that religion—especially 
revealed religion—is chargeable with having 
originated the conception of the Eternal and 
must alone bear the burden of vindicating the 
validity of the notion. But this assumption 
is erroneous. The conception of the Eternal, 
the Absolute, the Unconditioned, is a ne- 


cessity of Reason, and can not be escaped by 
3l 


32 The Solution of Being 


renouncing religion and substituting the ter- 
minology of philosophy for the name of God. 
Men may choose between various theories of 
the Eternal but they may not rid themselves of 
the conception of Eternity altogether. As the 
perception of body compels the idea of space to 
arise, the perception of the succession of events 
compels the notion of time—the notion of in- 
finite time, eternity. 

Which, then, of the three theories, from which 
we must choose in giving an account of our own 
existence and the existence of all things known 
to us, is the most reasonable? Which solves 
the problem of Being most satisfactorily ? 

Are men and things kaleidoscopic manifes- 
tations of Eternal, Self-Existent Matter? Ev- 
ery impression of Sense and Consciousness 
leads to the denial of this hypothesis. Nor 
does scientific investigation lead to a different 
conclusion. Common observation and _scien- 
tific research alike declare that every object 
in the universe cognizable by the senses has had 
a beginning in time. “The most powerful, 
penetrating and delicate instruments devised to 
assist our senses reach no cause which is not 
obviously also an effect. The progress of 
science has not more convincingly and conr 
pletely disproved the once prevalent notion that 
the universe was created about six thousand 


‘ pt 
Lie 


The Universe Not Eternal 33 


years ago, than it has convincingly and com- 
pletely established that everything of which our 
senses inform us has had a beginning in time, 
and is of a compound, derivative and dependent 
nature. It is not long since men had no means 
of proving that the rocks, for example, were not 
as old as the earth itself—no direct means of 
proving even that they were not Eternal; but 
geological science is now able to tell us with 
confidence under what conditions, in what or- 
der, and in what epochs of time they were 
formed. We have probably a more satisfac- 
tory knowledge of the formation of the coal 
measures than of the establishment of the feu- 
dal system. We know that the Alps, although 
they look as if they have stood forever, are 
not even old, as geologists count age. The 
morning and night, the origin and disappear- 
ance of the countless species of living things 
which have peopled the Earth from the enor- 
mously remote times when the rocks of the 
Laurentian period were deposited down to the 
births and deaths of contemporaneous animals, 
have been again brought into the light of day by 
the power of Science. The limits of research 
are not even there reached, and with bold flight 
Science passes beyond the confines of discoy- 
ered life—beyond the epochs of the formation 
even of the oldest rocks—to a time when there 


34 The World Not Self-Existent 


was no distinction of Earth and Sea and At- 
mosphere, as all were mingled together in neb- 
ulous matter, in some sort of fluid or mist or 
steam; yea, onwards to a time when our Earth 
had no separate existence, and Suns, Moons 
and Stars were not yet divided and arranged 
into systems. If we seek, then, after what is 
Eternal, science tells us that it is not the earth 
nor anything which it contains, not the sea nor 
the living things within it, not the moving air, 
not the Sun, nor the Moon, nor the Stars.’” 

This eloquent and invincible argument of 
Prof. Flint is not less emphatic and conclusive 
than the words of Prof. Clerk-Maxwell: 
“None of the processes of nature, since the 
time when nature began, have produced the 
slightest difference in the properties of any 
molecule. We are therefore unable to ascribe 
either the existence of the molecules or the 
identity of their properties to the operation of 
any of the causes which we call natural. On 
the other hand, the exact quality of each mole- 
cule to all others of the same kind gives it, as 
Sir John Herschel has well said, the essential 
character of a manufactured article, and pre- 
cludes the idea of its being eternal and _ self- 
existent.” 


*Flint’s “Theism,” pages 102, 103. 
7From address before the British Association for 
the Advancement of Science, 1870. 


“A Manifest Absurdity” 35 


The mind utterly refuses to believe matter 
self-existent. The hypothesis is unthinkable. 
Nor can reason be satisfied by referring the 
present order to causes back of it and these 
causes in turn back upon other causes, and so 
on through an infinite series. Prof. Flint 
well says: “The human mind universally and 
instantaneously rejects it as inconceivable, un- 
thinkable, self-contradictory, absurd. We may 
believe either in a self-existent God or a self- 
existent World, and must believe in one or the 
other ; we can not believe in an infinite regress 
of causes. The alternatives of a self-existent 
cause, and an infinite regress of causes, are not, 
as some would represent, equally credible alter- 
natives. The one is an indubitable truth, the 
other is a manifest absurdity. The one all men 
believe, the other no man believes.’” 

The validity of this argument is in nowise 
impaired by the modern theories of Evolution. 
Let us travel over whatsoever distance we may, 
scrutinizing the various links in the chain, we 
must finally reach a link which is fastened to a 
Self-Existent Cause. We may call that Cause 
by whatsoever name we will, God or Proto- 
plasm; It, or He, is worthy of our worship, and 
must command our reverence. 

What or who is this First Cause ? 


*Flint’s “Theism,” page 120, 


36 The Great First Cause 


Nature is a unit. The very word, universe, 
implies this. All knowledge of nature con- 
firms the view. The First Cause must there- 
fore have attributes which no two or more be- 
ings can possess. All nature when correctly 
interpreted repudiates dualism and polytheism. 
The Voice of the Universe cries in unison with 
the Voice of Revelation, “Hear, O Israel; 
The Lord our God is one Lord.” 

In nature there is life and mind. An effect 
can never contain an element superior to its 
cause. The First Cause therefore must be a 
living and intelligent Cause. 

The First Cause must be a free cause. “It 
can not have been itself caused. It is absurd to 
look for it among effects. But we never get 
out of the Sphere of Effects until we enter that 
of free agency, until we emerge from the natu- 
ral into the spiritual, until we leave matter 
and reach mind. The First Cause must indeed 
be in—all through—the universe; but it must 
also be out of the universe, anterior to, and 
above the universe. The idea of Cause is a de- 
lusion—the search for Causes an inexplicable 
folly—if there be no First Cause, and if that 
First Cause be not a free cause, a Will, a Spirit, 
a Person. Reason, if honest and consistent, can 
not in its pursuit of Causes stop short of a ra- 
tional will. That alone answers to and satis- 


The Lowest Terms of the Problem 37 


fies its idea of a Cause. The complex and har- 
monious constitution of the Universe is the Ex- 
pression of a Divine Idea, of a Creative Rea- 
son.’”* 

The hypothesis of a Great First Cause 
worthy of being called God and worshiped as 
such, is the most rational explanation of what 
we know ourselves to be and of what we per- 
ceive the universe around us to be. It reduces 
the mystery of existence to its lowest terms. 
It demonstrates the theorem that there is a God 
as nearly as it is possible for finite mind to 
comprehend such a transcendent proposition. 
All other explanations of the Universe, when 
followed to their logical consequences, lead us 
to the absurd. The most reasonable explana- 
tion of the universe is that “Nature is but the 
name for an effect whose Cause is God.” Its 
order, its marvelous adaptations, the existence 
of moral and intelligent beings as its climax, 
all point unerringly and inevitably to an Eter- 
nal Person of infinite Power, Wisdom and 
Goodness, working toward a grand moral and 
spiritual consummation—‘“one far-off divine 
event to which the whole creation moves.” 

The grandeur of the material universe and 
the essential greatness of human nature alike 
assure us that they can not be the outcome of 


‘Flint’s “Theism,” page 130. 


38 The Footprints of God 


blind and vagrant forces operating aimlessly 
in infinite space and limitless time, originat- 
ing we know not where, nor when, nor how, 
nor why. ‘The existence of life and mind 
and the moral sense point unerringly to an 
Author who is himself living, intelligent and 
moral. The facts around us and within us 
convince us that the universe and man are 
the visible embodiment of an_ intelligent 
and moral purpose. On the surface of 
both the material and immaterial world, in both 
matter and mind, are the footprints of an all- 
wise, all-powerful, infinitely pure Creator, 
greater than man and the universe, before all 
things, outside all things, and above all things. 
“All the causes with which we come in contact 
here are, as we term them, second causes; but 
they point to a cause beyond themselves, to a 
cause of causes, to a Supreme all-producing 
Cause, Itself uncaused, unoriginated. The 
heavenly bodies move on unceasingly in their 
orbits, obedient to the laws of gravitation, but 
no law of gravitation assigned them their place 
in space. The whole universe bids us look 
beyond itself for the adequate explanation of 
its existence.” 


*Liddon’s “Some Elements of Religion,” page 58. 


~ 


IV 


HAS GOD APPEARED AMONG MEN? 
IS JESUS A MYTH? 


“For we have not followed cunningly devised 
fables, when we made known unto you the power and 
coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eye-wit- 
nesses of his majesty.”—wSt. Peter. — 


“O myth! O how far exalted above all human 
mythology is this representation of Christ! He who 
could create such fiction is able also to create worlds, 
call spirits into being, inspire life and the highest 
blessedness, by the simple power of his breath. The 
facts are conclusive, that one has here not myth, 
but overwhelming reality and truth.”—Jacobi. 


“Measure Jesus by the shadow he has cast into the 
world? No, by the light he has shed upon it. Shall 
we be told such a man never lived? That the whole 
story is a lie? Suppose that Plato and Newton never 
lived. But who did their works, and thought their 
thoughts? It takes a Newton to forge a Newton. 
What man could have fabricated a Jesus? None but 
a Jesus.”—Theodore Parker, 


= 


LY 


Has Gop AprrarEpD Amona Men? Is JzEsus 
A Mytr? 


Havine considered the evidences of the exis- 
tence of God, and having seen that if such a 
being exists he has probably revealed himself to 
man, the question of fact now arises, “Has the 
God appeared among men ?”’ 

In seeking an answer to this question it is 
irrelevant to discuss the possibility of an incar- 
nation. That is a speculative issue which 
might be pertinent to some discussions, and it 
ig a matter of importance, but we are now con- 
cerned with a bare question of fact. If con- 
clusive evidence is found that an incarnation 
has taken place, that the God has appeared in 
our world, then there is an end of controversy 
touching the possibility of an incarnation. Nor 
will our incapacity to understand the mode of 
the incarnation in any degree affect the validity 
of the proof of it as a fact. Men must respect 
facts without regard to their own ability to 
understand modes and processes, and upon this 
principle they constantly act with the greatest 
confidence in dealing with all the affairs of 


every-day life. 
41 


49 God Can Not Be Mimicked 


There is little chance of deception about the 
incarnation as a fact, if the God has indeed ap- 
peared among men. The Divine nature rises 
too far above man’s nature to make the success- 
ful simulation of it an easy task. Any pseudo- 
theophanies, any impostures may be detected 
easily. The unearthly tones of the divine voice 
can not be so perfectly mimicked that men need 
mistake the speech of a pretender for the Word 
of God. The appearance of the true God, if 
He should appear, we may be sure will be as 
unmistakable as the lightning which cometh 
out of the East and shineth even unto the West; 
it can neither be concealed nor counterfeited. 

If the God has ever appeared among men he 
appeared in the person of him whom we call 
Jesus. All who have ever come, before him or 
after him, are manifestly “of the earth, earthy.” 
If he be not God we need not look for another. 
We may limit our question therefore to the 
narrower issue, “Did the God appear among 
men in the person of Jesus of Nazareth ?” 

In the investigation of this question we must 
not assume too much. Let us assume only 
those things which no one can deny, viz.: that 
in four brief memoirs commonly known as the 
Gospels a distinct, character is set forth under 
the name of Jesus. We do not assume that 
these short treatises were written by the men 


Is Jesus a Myth? 43 


whose names they bear. We do not assume 
that these records are authentic. We simply 
affirm that the character called Jesus is set 
forth in the books. 

The question then arises, Is this character a 
myth or a historic personage? And we affirm 
that neither the four Evangelists, nor any other 
men of that time or of any other time, could 
have invented this character, or have constructed 
it out of any materials which existed then or 
which exist now. 

Let us attend to some of the most striking 
features of this character. 

1. It is an original character. It has no 
companion piece in any literature, ancient or 
modern. The nearest approach to it is the 
Messianic character dimly set forth in the sa- 
cred books of the Jews. But neither ancient 
nor modern Jews recognize in Jesus the fulfil- 
ment of the ideal of their Messiah. Certainly 
no writer, Jewish or Pagan, in the age of Tibe- 
rius could have drawn the picture of Jesus from 
the Messianic outlines in the Hebrew Serip- 
tures. 

2. It is a. perfect character—“the only per- 
fect character that ever had a place in the his- 
tory or thought of men.” He is represented 
as living under the hardest conditions of pov- 
erty and friendlessness, opposed by enemies the 


44 Testimony of Lecky and Mill 


most implacable, beset by circumstances the 
most trying to piety and virtue. But he ig set 
forth as never sinning and never repenting. 
Of the faultlessness of this character a sceptical 
historian has written, “It was reserved for 
Christianity to present to the world an ideal 
character, which through all the changes of 
eighteen centuries has inspired the hearts of 
men with an impassioned love, has shown itself 
capable of acting on all nations, ages, temrera- 
ments, and conditions, has been not only the 
highest pattern of virtue but the strongest in- 
centive to its practice, and has exercised so 
deep an influence that it may be truly said that 
the simple record of three short years of active 
life has done more to regenerate and soften 
mankind than all the disquisitions of philoso- 
phers, and all the exhortations of moralists.’” 
Of this character John Stuart Mill has writ- 
ten, “When this pre-eminent genius is combined 
with the qualities of probably the greatest 
moral reformer and martyr to that mission who 
ever existed upon the earth, religion can not 
be said to have made a bad choice in pitching 
upon this man as the ideal representative and 
guide of humanity; nor even now would it be 
easy, even for an unbeliever, to find a better 


*Lecky’s “History of European Morals,” Vol. Ih; 
page 9. 


The Symmetry of the Character 45 


translation of the rule of virtue from the ab- 
stract to the concrete than to endeavor so to live 
that Christ would approve our life.’” 

3. The perfection of this character is espe- 
cially manifest in its perfect symmetry and 
balance of excellencies. It presents a combi- 
nation of the active and passive virtues in per- 
fect proportion, such as can not be found in 
any other person, historic or fictitious. It 
blends piety and philanthropy, holiness and 
compassion, justice and love, purity and ten- 
derness, joy and sorrow, in a way never before 
lived or imagined. “He is never said to have 
laughed, and yet he never makes the impression 
of austerity, moroseness, sadness, or even of be- 
ing unhappy.’” He endures the hardest priva- 
tions, and yet there is about him a majesty 
which forbids the thought of helplessness. ‘In 
fact he does not allow us after all to think much 
of his privations; we think of him more as a 
being of mighty resources, proving himself only 
the more sublimely that he is in the guise of 
destitution. He is the most unworldly of be- 
ings, having no desire at all for what the earth 
can give, impossible to be caught with any 
longing for its benefits, impassible even to its 


“Hissays on Theism,” page 255. 


*Bushnell’s “Nature and the Supernatural,” page 
286. 


46 Its Perfect Balance 


charms, and yet there is no ascetic sourness or 
Tepugnance, no misanthropic distaste in his 
manner, as if he were bracing himself against 
the world to keep it off. At the wedding he is 
clothed in congratulation, at the feast in doc- 
trine, at the funeral in tears ; but no miser was 
ever drawn to his money with a stronger desire 
than he to worlds above the world. Men un- 
dertake to be spiritual and they become ascetic ; 
or endeavoring to hold a liberal view of the 
comforts and pleasures of society, they are 
soon buried in the world and slaves to its fash- 
ions; or holding a scrupulous watch to keep out 
every particular sin, they become legal, and fall 
out of liberty; or charmed with noble and heav- 
enly liberty, they run to negligence and irre- 
sponsible living; so the earnest become violent, 
the fervent fanatical and censorious, the gentle 
waver, the firm turn bigots, the liberal grow lax, 
the benevolent ostentatious. Poor human 
infirmity can hold nothing steady. And yet 
the character of Christ is never modified, even 
by a shade of rectification. It is one and the 
same throughout. He makes no improvements, 
prunes no extravagances, returns from no 
eccentricities. The balance of his character 
is never disturbed or readjusted, and the as- 
tounding assumption on which it is based is 


| 
| 


The Character Universal 47 


never shaken even by a suspicion that he falters 
in it.’”” 

4. Again, the character of Jesus is a unt- 
versal character. In it there is nothing local 
or temporary. Nothing provincial or transient 
adheres to it. No phrase more aptly describes 
it than the words, “The Son of man.” As 
Renan says, “Jesus is the highest of the pillars 
that shew man whence he comes and whither 
he ought to tend. In him is condensed all 
that is good and exalted in our nature.”* Or as 
Strauss remarks “in every respect Jesus stands 
in the first line of those who have developed the 
ideal of humanity.” “There are many 
peculiarities arising out of personal and 
historical circumstances, which are incident 
to the best human characters, and which 
would prevent any one of them from being 
universal or final as a type. But the type 
set up in the Gospels as the Christian 
type seems to have escaped all these peculiari- 
ties and to stand out in unapproached purity as 
well as in unapproached perfection of moral ex- 
cellence. . . . . If that type of character 
was constructed by human intellect, we must 
at least bear in mind that it was constructed 
_*Bushnell’s “Nature and the Supernatural,” page 288. 


“Vie de Jesus,’ page 457. 
“Leben Jesus,” page 625. 


48 “The Essence of Man’s Moral Nature” 


at the confluence of three races, the Jewish, 
the Greek and the Roman, each of which had 
strong national peculiarities of its own. A 
single touch, a single taint of any one of those 
peculiarities, and the character would have 
been national, not universal; transient, not 
eternal. It might have been the highest char- 
acter in history but it would have been disquali- 
fied for being the ideal. Supposing it to have: 
been human, whether it were the real effort of 
a man to attain moral excellence or a moral 
imagination of the writers of the Gos 
pels, the chances surely were infinite against 
its escaping any tincture of the fanati- 
cism, formalism and exclusiveness of the Jew— 
of the political pride of the Roman—of the 
intellectual pride of the Greek. Yet it escaped 
them all. It is the essence of man’s moral na- 
ture clothed with a personality so vivid and 
intense as to excite through all ages the most 
intense affection, yet divested of all those pe- 
culiar characteristics, the accidents of time 
and place by which human personalities 
are marked.” 

5. This remarkable character does not 
appear in the pages of the Evangelists as fabri- 


°A lecture by Goldwin Smith, quoted by Ganon 
Liddon, on pages 216, 217 of “Some Elements of Re 
ligion.” 


“One Transcendent Creation’ 49 


cated by effort. “It is not set forth in a string’ 
of epithets, or abstract statements, or by vague, 
indiscriminate laudation.”” The character is 
set forth in easy, artless narratives about which 
there is an unmistakable air of reality. 

6. This marvelous character is the same 
wm each of the four books in which it appears. 
Four writers with indubitable independence 
have drawn essentially the same picture. Well 
does Principal Cairns say “One Gospel is a 
marvel, what shall we say of four, each with 
its distinct plan,—its enlargements and omis- 
sions, 1ts variations, even where most coincident, 
its problems as yet unsolved, but always yield- 
ing something to fresh inquiry, and only mak- 
ing more manifest the unchangeable oneness 
and dignity of the history? The difficulties 
of the Gospels from divergence are as nothing 
compared with the impression made by them all 
of one transcendent creation.” 

7. Furthermore, the task of the Evangelists 


was not ended with drawing a faultless 
figure. They must put speech upon its 
lips which would be in keeping with 
the majesty of its pretensions. If they 
imagined the man, they must also have im- 
agined his teachings, and what they represent 


7G. P. Fisher’s “Manual of Christian Evidences.” 


“Christ, the Central Evidence of Christianity,” in 
“Tracts for the Times,” Vol. I., page 4. 
4 


50 His Wonderful Words 


him as saying is as marvelous as what they 
describe him as being. His doctrines are final. 
They are ultimate truths which the world can 
never outgrow. It is not possible to think a 
thought higher than his doctrine of the father- 
hood of God, nor one wider than his tenet of 
the brotherhood of man, nor one deeper than 
his conception of holiness of heart. Hope can 
not dream a brighter vision than that which 
shines in his teachings concerning the resur- 
rection of the body and the life everlasting after 
death. His conception of a world-wide “King- 
dom of Heaven,” 
is absolutely unique; for it seers and philoso- 
phers have brought forth no mate idea. The 
sayings of Jesus are not anticipated by any 
discourses before his time, and not one soli- 
tary shred of religious truth has been added to 
the world’s stock since the Gospels were first 
published. 

8. Moreover the Evangelists record these 
marvelous utterances as parts of a calm narra- 
tive. They do not betray the excitement of 
discoverers in penning them, but they evince 
the calmness of eye-witnesses who simply repeat 
the words of a speaker uttered in their own 
hearing which were so entirely in keeping with 
his supernatural nature as to leave no room for 
surprise. They represent him as speaking with 


which should endure forever, 


A Calm Narrative 51 


the most perfect serenity. “He delivers the 
most tremendous truths with the most perfect 
composure and balance of spirit. If a mere 
man were to see clearly for the first time 
what the Sermon on the Mount, the third 
Chapter of John, the parable of the Prod- 
igal, and a score of other discourses and reve- 
lations like them, really signify; if a mere man 
were, so to speak, to come suddenly upon such 
thoughts, such conceptions, so vast, deep and 
high, it would unbalance him. His brain would 
be on fire and his heart would break with holy 
excitement.” But the Evangelists break into 
no rhapsodies when they record his words. 

Is this marvelous character a myth? Are 
his discourses the inventions of novelists and 
romancers? Is the character the creature of 
imagination and the doctrine the product of the 
collaboration of four Jewish peasants of the 
time of Tiberius? Or of any other time? 

Neither the age of Tiberius nor any other 
age could have supplied the intellectual agencies 
equal to the task of creating the character and 
discourses of Jesus. After the Christian 
world has had the benefit of the four Gospels 
for eighteen centuries there has not been pro- 
duced, nor can there now be found a writer who 
is able to imagine a character which approxi- 
°“The Man of Galilee,” by Bishop Haygood, page 77. 


52 An Impossible Invention 


mates this character. The task lies quite be- 
yond the powers of modern writers, however 
great; and far more beyond the capacity of any 
one in the first centuries of the Christian era,—- 
most of all beyond the ability of Matthew, Mark, 
Luke and John, to whom the four gospels are 
commonly attributed. “If to them had been 


granted all personal qualifications, the condi-— 


tions under which they lived made the invention 
of such a character impossible; they could not 
breathe the intellectual, social and moral air 
in which they lived and do it. For this char- 
acter, the Jesus of the Evangelists, is not in 
harmony with the essential characteristics of 
the Jewish race, or with the dominant influ- 
ences of that time; this character antagonizes 
these characteristics and influences at every 
point.” “Equally, it is incredible that these 
four men could have thought out the teachings 
of Jesus. For such thinking they lacked all 
things that history and philosophy show to be 
necessary for such thinking. Why could not 
Socrates and Plato, great, learned, wise and 
good, to whom came more than glimpses of 
heavenly truths, think out what the Sermon on 
the Mount contains. Socrates and Plato, if 
mere men could do such thinking, ought to have 
thought out the Sermon on the Mount; for they 


“Bishop Haygood’s “Man of Galilee,” page 20, 


Rousseau’s Conclusion 53 


had every gift that nature could bestow, and 
every opportunity cultured Athens could offer. 
And they did their best to think out the truths 
that bind Man and God together. They failed; 
and Plato sighed for the coming of a divine 
Man who could make clear what to him was 
dark. And yet if Jesus never lived, the four 
Evangelists, or men like them, thought out His 
wonderful doctrines. It is unthinkable.’’*? 
The life and words of Jesus are beyond the 
power of inventive genius. ‘The life was lived; 
the words were spoken, or the Gospels are 
themselves as great a miracle as the incarnation 
of God. As Rousseau puts the case,—“The 
Gospel has marks of truth so great, so striking, 
so perfectly inimitable, that the inventor of it 
would be more astonishing than the hero.” 
And this conclusion is still further confirmed, 
if we consider the mighty and beneficent forces 
which have issued from Christianity. Can 
influences so pure and institutions so enduring 
have sprung from a myth, and that too during 
the centuries in which men have been recording 
consecutive histories? Discussing this myth- 
ical theory, Prebendary Row says with great 
force, “Its meaning, stripped of all disguises, 
is that the mightiest power, which for more than 


11Bishop Haygood’s “The Man of Galilee,” pages 21, 22. 


54 Has a Myth Saved the World? 


eighteen centuries has energized for good, nay 
more, which is at this moment the cause of an 
overwhelming majority of such institutions as 
exist in Europe and America for promoting the 
happiness of man is based on a delusion. If 
then the Jesus of the Gospels is an ideal crea- 
tion, and not an historical reality, then a phan- 
tom and a shadow has been the centre of a 
mightier power, and has exerted a mightier 
influence for good than all the realities which 
have ever existed. If this be so, one thing is 
true and one only,—that man is walking in a 
vain shadow and disquieting himself in vain. 
Why then struggle for truth, for delusions are 
mightier than realities, and their influence for 
good has been greater than all the self-sacrifice 
of the wisest and best of men. If so, all is 
vanity! the present life is a dream, the life to 
come a blank, and man’s only hope—shall I not 
say his best hope ?—is to be swallowed up in that 
eternal silence out of which he has come, to 
which he is hastening, and from which there 
will be no awakening.” 

“The person of Jesus Christ stands solid in 
the history of man. He is indeed more sub- 
stantial, more abiding, in human apprehension 
than any form of matter, or mode of force. 
The conceptions of earth and air, and fire and 


zManual of Christian Evidences,” page 93. 


A Real Christ Appeared 55 


water, change and melt around him as the 
clouds melt and change around an everlasting 
mountain peak. All attempts to resolve him 
into a myth, a legend, an air—and hundreds 
of such attempts have been made—have drifted 
over the enduring reality of his character and 
left not a rack behind. The result of all crit- 
icism, the final verdict of enlightened common 
sense, is that Christ is historical. He is such 
a person as men could not have imagined if 
they would, and would not have imagined if 
they could. He is neither Greek myth nor He- 
brew legend. The artist capable of fashioning 
Him did not exist, nor could he have found the 
materials. A non-existent Christianity did not 
spring out of the air and create a Christ. A 
real Christ appeared in the world and created 
Christianity.” 

He is so real and enduring that the authors 
who concocted the “mythical theory” could not 
publish their books without dating the publica- 
tion from the day of His birth. The small fig- 
ures near the bottom of their title-pages more 
than refuted all the arguments contained in the 
chapters which followed. The marvels which 
the Christian Scriptures record as having at- 
tended His birth, and which the critics would 


8“The Gospel for an Age of Doubt,” by Henry Van 
Dyke, D.D., page 59. 


56 The World’s Dates Fixed by Christ 


resolve into legendary wonders, are not so as- 
tounding as that Jesus of Nazareth should con- 
strain the world’s date-lines to bend around his 
manger cradle. When commerce makes entries 
on its ledgers, when governments issue decrees 
or publish laws, when infants are born or the 
aged die, when kings or peasants enter the 
world, or when they pass to their long home— 
all pay homage to the Babe of Bethlehem. Cal- 
endars which fix dates can not rest on a floating 
myth. Absolute exactness they may miss as 
when men dated by the beginning of the world 
or the founding of Rome. But they point to 
firm facts that can not be dissolved into myth. 
That Jesus was born at Bethlehem about nine- 
teen hundred years ago is as certain as that the 


earth exists or that Rome was built on the 
Tiber, 


V 


HAS GOD APPEARED AMONG MEN? 
IS THE JESUS OF THE EVANGELISTS 
DIVINE? 


“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among 
us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only 
begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.”—St. 
John, 


“Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.”— 
St. Peter at Caesarea Philippi. 


“My Lord and my God.”’—St. Thomas. 
“Rabbi, thou art the Son of God.”—wNathanael. 


“What is the mystery of his person? What does 
he say of himself? For this will always have to be 
that which, after all, makes the final decision. For 
so much confidence we can in any case give him— 
be we never so distrustful in other respects—that 
he knew who he was, and did not speak differently 
from what he knew.”—Luthardt. 


“He called himself the Son of God: who among 
mortals dare say he was not?’—Lequinia. 


SS eee 


<a 


Se Ce 


Vv 


Has Gop ApprarEep Amona Men? Is THE 
JESUS OF THE EVANGELISTS DIvinz ? 


Tux story of Jesus is a history and not a fic- 
tion. Neither the Evangelists nor any other 
writer could have imagined such a character. 
And if the conception of such a life be beyond 
the power of human imagination, how much 
more beyond human ability is the fulfilling of 
such an ideal by actual existence. Ideals are 
easier of conception than of execution. 

Against this conclusion no argument touch- 
ing the possibility, or the credibility, of miracles 
is of any force. The character of Jesus is here, 
and it is of such sort that it transcends the power 
of human invention to originate and of human 
effort to actualize. Even now, after it has 
been given to men, the wisest among them can 
not fully expound his words, nor the holiest per- 
fectly imitate his example. Herein is a miracle 
before our own eyes far greater than any single 
incident in the brief memoirs by the Evangel- 
ists. If the deeds attributed to him, which 
men call miracles, be extracted from the four 
Gospels, there is left a fragment of the history 
more difficult to account for than the whole. 
The unmiraculous facts of his life, which can 


not be denied, become the most miraculous if 
59 


60 The Unmiraculous Facts 


he be not God, for he exhibits superhuman 
purity without superhuman power. The de- 
scription given of him by the Evangelists veri- 
fies itself as historic reality, and the life de 
scribed vindicates the claim that he is God. 
The unmiraculous facts of his history in the 
‘flesh “forbid his possible classification with 
men.” 

Briefly stated, these facts are a birth in a 
peasant home; a childhood spent in a despised 
village of a despised province of a narrow coun- 
try on the Mediterranean Sea, which was dur- 
ing his life an unimportant part of the Roman 
Empire; a youth and early manhood occupied 
with the hard toil of a carpenter’s life without 
formal education in any school; a public life of 
less than three brief years and a death of shame 
before his thirty-fifth year. Between his birth 
and death we find him enduring the hardest pov- 
erty; without teachers or friends among the 
learned and powerful, but rather opposed and 
hated by them; with no associates but the com- 
mon, ignorant people of his day and country; 
and without so much as sympathy for his work 
and purposes among his nearest friends and 
dearest kindred. In the midst of such unfa- 
vorable conditions his wonderful character was 
unfolded and his great conceptions were put 
forth. Under these hard conditions and diffi- 


His Majesty and Humility 61 


cult limitations he lived a life of innocence 
without weakness, piety without penitence, 
uniting in perfect harmony both the active and 
passive virtues in such a manner as they were 
never combined in any other being who has ap- 
peared among men. 

While giving this perfect exemplification of 
personal purity and flawless virtue he assumed 
an attitude of supremacy toward all men and of 
equality with God. Moreover there was in him 
such inherent majesty and about him such visi- 
ble royalty that he was able to put forward these 
amazing pretensions without shocking mankind. 
“For eighteen hundred years, these prodigious 
assumptions have been published and preached 
to a world that is quick to lay hold of conceit 
and bring down the lofty airs of pretenders, and 
yet during all this time, whole nations of people, 
composing as well the learned and powerful as 
the ignorant and humble, have paid their hom- 
age to the name of Jesus, detecting never any 
disagreement between his merits and his pre- 
tensions, offended never by any thought of his 
extravagance. Indeed it will even be found 
that, in the common apprehension of the race, 
he maintains the merit of a most peculiar mod- 
esty, producing no conviction more distinctly 
than of his intense lowliness and humility.’” 


*Bushnell’s “Nature and the Supernatural,” page 291. 


62 His Kingdom 


In keeping with these unprecedented preten- 
sions, this untaught carpenter from a despised 
province, in a land inhabited by a people held 
in vassalage, set about organizing a kingdom 
which he proposed should be universal in extent, 
everlasting in duration, and possess the quality 
of lifting its citizens to such an elevation as 
that they might become sons of God. He put 
forth this extraordinary scheme in all its de- 
tails at the outset of his public life, leaving no 
room for modification, either by addition or sub- 
traction. He was never discouraged as to its 
success, and in the shadow of his cross was as 
confident of victory as in the days of his greatest 
popularity. A devoted woman anointed him 
at a feast and in eulogizing her act he predicted 
in one breath that he would soon die, and that 
nevertheless his Gospel would be preached 
throughout the whole world, and the incident 
told as ‘a memorial of her.” 

He went about founding his kingdom as no 
man ever did. He excluded force; the scimitar 
was not with him as with Mahomet, the instru- 
ment of his apostolate. He did not rely upon 
diplomacy or priesteraft, creed or philosophy, 
argument or system. He wrote not a line, 
founded no school, arranged no pompous cere- 
monies or elaborate ritual. He took the way 


His Diine Method 63 


of dying, declaring, “And I, if I be lifted up, 
will draw all men unto me.” 

He takes rank with the poor and among the 
poor he found the best material for citizenship 
in the kingdom he proposed. But he was the 
farthest possible removed from the socialistic 
agitator. He appealed to no class prejudice, 
aspired to no leadership of a clan seeking to 
avenge any real or imagined grievance against 
society. He awakened no impulse of partisan 
feeling among the common people who heard 
him gladly. He had compassion on the mul- 
titude but he never veered from his plan to win 
popular approval. In an age of superstition 
he appealed to the superstitious masses without 
a syllable of concession to any of the delusive 
notions which they entertained. He spoke to 
his times and to all times from the standpoint 
of one who is outside and above all distinctions 
of time and event. His voice was that of love 
calling from the highest heaven. 

The spirit in which he lived and toiled cast 
a halo around the life he fulfilled and the plan 
he prosecuted. “In all the history of his life 
we are not able to detect the faintest indication 
that he slips or falters. And this is more re- 
markable that he is prosecuting so great a work 
with so great enthusiasm, counting it his meat 
and drink, and pouring into it all the energies 


64 His Divine Spirit 


of his life. For when men have great works 
on hand their very enthusiasm runs to impa- 
tience. When thwarted or unreasonably hin- 
dered, their very souls strike fire against the 
obstacles they meet, they worry themselves at 
every hindrance, every disappointment, and 
break out in stormy and fanatical violence. 
But Jesus for some reason is just as even, just 
as serene, in all his petty vexations and hin- 
drances, as if he had nothing on hand to do. A 
kind of sacred patience invests him everywhere. 
He is poor and hungry and weary and despised, 
insulted by his enemies, deserted by his friends, 
but never disheartened, never fretted or ruffled. 
He does not seem to rule his temper, but rather 
to have none.’” 

By what name does reason demand us to call 
one who has so lived and so labored? May we 
not reasonably trust one so good, so wise and so 
calm, to state his own place in the Universe? 
Is he not too true to deceive us? Is he not too 
wise and too serene to be himself deceived? Is 
not the charge of imposture or fanaticism inad- 
missible in his case? May we not with Chan- 
ning say, “When I trace the unaffected majesty 
which runs through the life of Jesus, and see 
him never falling below his sublime claims, 
amidst poverty and scorn, and his last agony, I 
*Bushnell’s “Nature and the Supernatural,” page 294, 


2 a ee ee 


“The Most Hopeless Agnosticism” 65 


have a feeling of the reality of his character 
which I can not express. I feel that the Jew- 
ish carpenter could no more have conceived and 
sustained this character under motives of im- 
posture than an infant’s arm could repeat the 
deeds of Hercules or his unawakened intellect 
comprehend and rival the matchless works of 
genius.”’ And if we may not charge him with 
imposture, much less may we charge him with 
being deceived by the madness of enthusiasm, 
or the folly of fanaticism. It is admitted on 
all hands that he is without fault. But if we 
admit that in righteousness he is perfect and 
affirm nevertheless that as to himself he was 
deceived, then the most royal virtue was unable 
to find and hold the truth. Then indeed we 
have reached the most hopeless agnosticism. If 
Jesus was deceived all other men may well 
despair of finding what is true. Henceforth 
the pursuit of truth is but “a fool’s errand.” 
But if Jesus was neither a deceiver nor de- 
ceived, it is of the last importance that we con- 
sider his own estimate of himself. What does 
he claim for himself? Hear him: “I am 
the light of the World.” ‘No man cometh to 
the Father but by me.” “I and the Father 
that sent me.” ‘‘Come unto me, all ye that la- 
bor and are heavy laden, and I will give you 


rest.” If he be not God did presumption ever 
4) 


66 Not Good if Not God 


rise so high as his conceit? If he be not God 
there is mingled in his nature the wildest chaos 
of truth and falsehood, pride and humility, rev- 
erence and profanity, wisdom and folly, weak- 
ness and strength, piety and wickedness. The 
criticism which denies his divinity while allow- 
ing him unsurpassed wisdom and unparalleled 
virtue is illogical and self-destructive. If he is 
not God, he is not good. The acknowledgment 
of his divinity is the only rational solution of 
the facts of his humanity. 

“Tt is easier for a good man to believe that in 
a world where he is encompassed by mysteries, 
where his own being is a consummate mystery, 
the Moral Author of the wonders around him 
should for great moral purposes have taken to 
himself a created form, than that the one human 
life which realizes the idea of humanity, who 
is at once perfect strength and perfect tender- 
ness, the one pattern of our race in whom its vir- 
- tues are combined, and from whom its vices are 
eliminated, should have been guilty when speak- 
ing about himself, of an arrogance, of a self- 
seeking and of an insincerity, which, if ad- 
mitted, must justly degrade him far below the 
moral level of millions among his unhonored 
worshipers. It is easier, in short, to believe 
that God has consummated his works of wonder 
and mercy by a crowning self-reyelation in 


“The Blasphemy of Imposture’’ 67 


which mercy and beauty reach their climax, 
than to close the moral eye to the brightest spot 
that meets it in human history and to see at 
last in man’s inexplicable destiny only the jus- 
tification of his despair.”* “For if, not being 
divine, He yet claimed divinity, we should 
shrink back from him, revolted and appalled. 
The meanest capacity can recognize the unut- 
terable distance which separates man from 
God; and how could we respect One who, not 
being God, yet even in the feebleness of his 
obscurity, even in the depth of his nameless 
humiliation, even in the utter impotence of 
his human infirmity, made Himself equal with 
God? Oh! would not this have been the very 
blasphemy of imposture, the very insanity of 
self-deception, the very fatuity of arrogance 
in one whom all have recognized as the wisest, 
humblest, holiest of the Sons of men. Truly, 
if we reject His Godhead, then, though we 
took not up stones to stone Him, we might well 
turn from Him with agonies of wrath and 
tears.’” 

Men who iaud his wisdom and goodness, 
while denying his divinity, involve themselves 
in logical contradictions and moral inconsisten- 

*Liddon’s Bampton Lectures, pages 204, 205. 


‘Canon Farrar’s “Witness of History to Christ,” 
page 85. 


68 Betraying Him With a Kiss 


cies, which a plain man can neither reconcile 
nor understand. Like Judas in the garden, 
they seem to hail Him as Lord while they be- 
tray Him with a kiss. They treat Him as the 
ancient Pagans treated a sacrificial ox—cover 
Him with garlands while leading Him to death. 

But in seeking thus to crucify the Son of God 


afresh they do but advance to their own destruc- ” 


tion and to the overthrow of their treacherous 
systems. When St. Peter, in the face of all sorts 
of popular but false views of Jesus which ac- 
counted Him as one of the prophets but denied 
His divinity, declared “Thou art the Christ 
the Son of the Living God”—he declared the im- 
movable conclusion of invincible logic as well 
as the assured belief of confident faith, 


OO Ee 


Vi 


HAS GOD APPEARED AMONG MEN? 
DID JESUS RISE FROM THE DEAD? 
ST. PAUL’S TESTIMONY EXAMINED 


“Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the Gos- 
pel which I preached unto you, which also ye have 
received, and wherein ye stand; by which also ye are 
saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto 
you, unless ye have believed in vain. For I delivered 
unto you first of all that which I also received, how 


that Christ died for our sins according to the , 


Scriptures; and that he was buried, and that he rose 
again the third day according to the Scriptures: and 
that he was seen of Cephas, then of the Twelve. 
After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren 
at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this 
present, but some are fallen asleep. After that, he 
was seen of James; then of all the Apostles. And 
last of all, he was seen of me also, as of one born out 
of due time.”—St. Paul to the Corinthians. 


“The apostolic writers have staked the truth of 
Christianity on one miracle alone—the resurrection 
of Jesus Christ from the dead. Of this we have 
stronger proof than of any other event in the history 
of the past. This being so, to allow the truth of 
Christianity to be staked on any of those numerous 
issues which at the present day are raised, as though 
its truth or falsehood depends on our ability to solve 
them, is not only unnecessary, but in numerous cases 
extremely dangerous. ‘What sign,’ say the Jews, 
‘showest thou unto us, seeing thou doest these 
things? i. e. the cleansing of the temple. Jesus an- 
swered and said unto them: Destroy this temple, and 
in three days I will raise it UD.) Pee ele spake 
of the temple of His body.’ ”*—-Prebendary Row, 


a ee ee 


VI 


Has Gop ArpprarEep AmMona Men? Drip JEsus 
Rist From ture Deap? St. Paut’s TzEs- 
TIMONY EXAMINED. 


Iw the preceding chapters no miracle of Je 
sus has been assumed, or relied on, to attest 
his divinity. Only the undenied and unde- 
niable facts of his life on the earth—the un- 
miraculous facts—have been arrayed to estab- 
lish his divine character and authority. These 
unmiraculous facts are admitted by the most 
celebrated unbelievers in the world. No one 
competent to pass on such a question now de- 
nies that during the reign of Tiberius an emi- 
nent Jew, called Jesus, gathered about him in 
Palestine a number of followers who believed 
in him as the Messiah of Jewish expectation, 
and that they continued in this belief even 
after he disappeared from among men, and 
that in common with those first followers there 
are millions of professed disciples of this same 
Jesus now on the earth who claim that after 
his execution by Pontius Pilate, his death, and 
his burial, he arose from the dead. 

Is this claim founded in fact, or is it false ? 
Did Jesus indeed rise from the dead? If the 


resurrection of Jesus can not be established as 
71 


2 Then God Seemed Dead 


an historical fact, it is an idle waste of time 
to either defend or attack any other miracles 
attributed to him. His death, if he rose not, is 
fatal to his every claim of divinity, and his ca- 
reer among men only adds another problem to 
the stock of their religious perplexity. If he did 
not rise from the dead, all the other miracles 
recorded in the New Testament, even though 
the records were multiplied until the books 
filled the world, would not avail to prove him 
divine or attest Christianity as a divine revela- 
tion. In fact, the more such miracles seemed 
to show him a superhuman person the more 
confusing and sorrowful would be the case of 
his followers, for if he were only a man, the 
worst that could be said at his death would be 
that the best man the world ever saw could not 
escape death; but if he appeared to be 
God and then died—hopelessly died without a 
resurrection—then God seemed dead! Pitiable 
beyond all expression would be the case of the 
holiest man falling before death never to rise 
again; but horrible beyond power of both 
thought and speech would be the fact that even 
the God himself had succumbed to death! Tf 
his miracles before his death led any of his 
followers to believe Him divine, and after his 
death Jesus did not rise, then, as one of them 
truly said, “they were of all men most misera- 


The Key of the Christian Position 73 


ble,” and they who have succeeded to their faith 
have inherited a legacy of darkness and woe. 

If, on the other hand, he did rise from the 
dead all controversy is at an end. The spell 
of the natural is passed. The supernatural 
has broken in upon our world. He _ hath 
brought life and immortality to light. Any 
and all of his other miracles are credible, a 
prior. presumptions to the contrary notwith- 
standing. 

The key of the Christian position therefore 
is In this bare issue of fact, and it is to the 
consideration of this issue we are now come. 

For the time being let the testimony of the 
Evangelists be set aside since unbelievers claim 
that those “memoirs” were not accepted even 
by the churches until the latter part of the sec- 
ond century. Later we shall have occasion to 
show that this hypothesis is untenable, but for 
the present let it stand as if it were historically 
well founded, while we consider the testimony 
of another witness—testimony concerning 
which, in some particulars at least, all parties 
are agreed and about which there can be no 
reasonable doubt. 

However men may dispute as to the date, 
authorship and authenticity of the four books 
ealled “the Gospels,” it is agreed on all sides 


74 The Indubitable Epistles 


that St. Paul wrote the Epistles to the Gala- 
tians, the Romans and the Corinthians. 

Baur says: “Not only has no suspicion of 
the authenticity of these Epistles ever arisen, 
but they bear so incontestably the seal of the 
originality of Paul that one can not compre- 
hend for what reason critics could raise any 
objection to them.’” 

M. Renan, in “The Gospels,” pages 40 and 
41, declares: “The Epistles of Paul have an 
unequalled advantage in this history—that is, 
their absolute authenticity. No serious doubt 
has ever been raised of the authenticity of the 
Epistle to the Galatians, the two Epistles to 
the Corinthians, and _ the Epistle to the 
Romans.” In his work entitled “St. Paul,” he 
classes them as “uncontested and incontestable.” 

What proof do these indubitable Kpistles fur- 
nish that Jesus rose from the dead ? 

Before inquiring into the points of testimony 
set forth in these Epistles, let certain features 
touching their general character be passed in 
review. 

Beyond all question these four documents 
carry us to the earliest days of Christianity. 
The latest date which can be assigned them is 
twenty-eight years after the crucifixion. 
They were written during an interval of time 


*Baur’s “Apostle Paul,” pages 1-8. 


Saye men eg ee ee Bm 
Bae te, Vee ee re 


The Date of the Epvstles 75 


after the crucifixion as short as the period be- 
tween the present time and the time of Prince 
Bismarck’s contest with Pius IX.—shorter by 
two years than the period which has elapsed 
since Victor Emanuel entered Rome as the capi- 
tal of United Italy. “Not only were they writ- 
ten within twenty-eight years of the ecrucifix- 
ion, by one whose activity as a Missionary of 
Christianity had extended over the preceding 
twenty years, but who was then of such an age 
that his historical recollections were good for 
at least fifteen years earlier.” The writer of 
these Epistles had therefore such ample in- 
formation as to the facts and beliefs held by 
the early church, and such perfect knowledge 
of contemporary events, as leave no room for 
mistake, unless he was the victim of hallucina- 
tion, or the author of falsehood. Moreover, 
as he tells us in the first Epistle to the Cor- 
inthians (xv. 9), he at first persecuted the 
church with which subsequently he identified 
himself, and attempted to extirpate the faith 
which he afterwards embraced. He came to it 
therefore with no favorable bias towards it. 

He gives his testimony in the form of letters,’ 

*Prebendary C. A. Row’s “Historical Evidence of 
the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the Dead,” 
page 14. 

°N. B.—Christianity is the only religion the sacred 
books of which contain epistles. It is a religion of 


facts, for letters can not arise without persons and 
the facts of personal history. 


76 What the Four Letters Show 


and not in the form of set histories or argu- 
ments. ‘Ihe value of contemporary letters as 
historical documents in determining the facts 
of any period of history can not be overesti- 
mated. ‘Their allusions to current events not 
only attest those events, but they help to a right 
understanding of the significance of such hap- 
penings. How do the letters of Cicero certify 
and illumine the events which occurred in the 
Roman world of his time! 

Now, what do these four letters of St. Paul 
show as to the fact of the Resurrection of Jesus? 

They show that their author, and those 
to whom they were addressed, professed to be- 
lieve most firmly in the resurrection as a fact, 
and that they considered that fact as the very 
foundation of the faith to which they adhered. 
In the first sentences of the Epistle to the 
Romans, he says of Christ that he was “de- 
clared to be the Son of God with power, accord- 
ing to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrec- 
tion from the dead.” (Romans i. 4.) In the 
salutation with which the Epistle to the Gala- 
tians begins, he declares his apostleship, which 
his enemies had denied, in these words: ‘Paul, 
an apostle, not of men, neither by man, but by 
Jesus Christ, and God the Father, who raised 
him from the dead.” (Galatiansi.1.) In the 
first Epistle to the Corinthians he declares with 


Bee = — : — 
le ee nt — = 


A Wide-spread Belief 77 


great emphasis, “If Christ be not risen, then is 
our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. 
Yea, and we are found false witnesses of 
| by] God; because we have testified of God 
that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not 
up, if so be that the dead rise not.” (1 Corin- 
thians xv. 14, 15.) . 

It is shown by these Epistles that a pro-— 
fessed belief in the fact of the resurrection was 
universally prevalent in churches widely sepa- 
rated, as the churches of Galatia, Corinth and 
Rome. We find this belief in churches not 
established by Paul, as well as in those of 
which he was the founder; for at the writing 
of the Epistle to the Romans he had never vis- 
ited Rome. These Epistles show that all the 
Apostles (of whom Paul names Peter, James 
and John as Apostles with whom he had per- 
sonal interviews) claimed to believe that their 
Lord had risen from the dead, and that they 
had seen him and talked with him after his res- 
urrection. (Galatians ii. 9; 1 Corinthians xv. _ 
5.) The first Epistle to the Corinthians shows 
that when it was written there were still living 
not less than two hundred and fifty people who 
claimed that they had seen the risen Jesus. (1 
Corinthians xv. 6.) 

{t is furthermore clear that men of all 
parties and shades of opinion, however they 


78 The Belief of all Parties 


might differ as to other matters, accepted the 
resurrection of Jesus as a fact. The Epistles 
to the Corinthians and to the Galatians are 
highly controversial documents, but in them all 
St. Paul resists his opponents by appealing to 
the resurrection of Jesus as the central axiom 
of the faith, so settled and undeniable that all 
dispute must cease when it was reached. In 
the Corinthian Church there were fierce par- 
ties who were opposed to him. Some of these 
parties gathered around persons, as Apollos, 
Peter and “Christ.” One of these parties went 
so far as to question his apostolic authority be- 
cause he had not been one of the original com- 
panions of Jesus, who had seen him after the 
resurrection. He meets the attack by warmly 
asking, “Have I not seen Jesus Christ our 
Lord?’ (4 Corinthians ix. 1.) Whether these 
words prove that Paul had really seen the 
risen Saviour or not, they establish the fact 
that his opponents believed the Saviour had 
risen, and that all the Apostles had seen him, 
and that sight of the risen Lord was requisite 
toanapostleship. Otherwise the question could 
have had no force at all in the controversy. 
In the Galatian churches there was a party 
who not only questioned his apostleship, but 
who put forth a doctrine so different from, 
and diametrically opposed to, his teaching, that 


No Late After-growth 19 


he characterized their system as “another Gos- 
pel.” (Galatians i. 6.). As against them he as- 
serted that his authority, as we have seen, was 
derived from “Jesus Christ and God the Father, 
who raised him from the dead.” “If St. Paul’s 
belief and that of his opponents had not been 
at complete accord on the subject of the resur- 
rection, no man in his senses would have thrown 
such a challenge as that which is contained in 
these words, and also in terms equally strong 
throughout the entire Epistle.’”* Moreover, in 
the Galatian Epistle, Paul declares his com- 
plete harmony with Peter, James and John, 
and challenges his opponents, who had come 
out from the churches where these Apostles 
lived and labored, to show to the contrary. 
This fact shows that the belief in the resurrec- 
tion of Jesus, which was prevalent in Corinth, 
Rome and Galatia, was held also by the churches 
at Antioch and Jerusalem. (Galatians ii. 
11, 12.) 

It is thus evident that the belief that Jesus 
rose from the dead was no late after-growth in 
the history of Christianity, but was a fact joy- 
ously accepted in the oldest churches from the 
first—even in the Church at J erusalem, the 


*Prebendary Row’s “Historical Evidence of the 
Resurrection of Jesus Christ,” page 20. 


80 The Church Created by the Belief 


city at which the great fact was alleged to have 
occurred, and where were living witnesses who 
claimed to have seen him, and where there 
were living enemies of the faith, personally in- 
terested and fearfully impelled by implication 
in a great crime, to disprove the claim if they 
could. 

From these four Epistles it is clear be- 
yond all controversy “that within a few months 
after the crucifixion the church must have 
been reconstructed on the foundation of the be- 
lief that its crucified Messiah had been raised 
again from the dead.’” It is evident that be- 
tween the crucifixion and the reconstruction of 
the church there could not have been a longer 
interval than a few months or weeks, because, 
as Prebendary Row forcibly says: “If the inter- 
val had been longer while the belief was grow- 
ing, the church must have perished in its 
Founder’s grave.” 

Such being the facts, as to the early faith and 
founding of the church, there are but three theo- 
ries by which to account for them: 

1. Belief in the Resurrection was a con- 
scious and intended fraud by the Apostles and 
their followers of the first century. 


*Prebendary Row’s “Historical Evidence of the 
Resurrection of Jesus Christ,” page 27. 


Not a Fraud 81 


2. Or, they were deceived by some form of 
hallucination. 

3. Or, Jesus did indeed rise from the dead. 

Let these alternatives be considered in their 
order. 

The early Christians lacked both motive and 
ability for a fraud so stupendous and success- 
ful as was involved in preaching “Jesus and 
the resurrection.” What had they to gain in 
this, or any other world by preaching that 
Jesus had risen from the dead, if it were not a 
fact? If their statements were false, they 
would incur the hatred of friends, the persecu- 
tion of foes, exile, torture and death, and all 
this without any hope of success; for we must 
not conceive of the Apostles entering upon the 
task laid upon them as if in full view of the 
marvelous success which has issued in the form 
of Christianity during the last nineteen centu- 
ries. Without the resurrection they were fore- 
doomed to failure as well as committed to fraud. 
They had absolutely nothing to gain and every- 
thing to lose. And this was pre-eminently true 
of St. Paul. 

Again, to what motive could they appeal in 
seeking to attract others to their party? They 
laid upon their converts (perverts if drawn only 
to a fraud) the most rigorous rules of self-sacri- 


fice. Without convincing men that the resur- 
6 


82 Fraud Could Not Convince 


rection was a fact, how could such lives of self- 
sacrifice be brought to pass ? 

“If in very truth Christ rose from the dead, 
all the facts before us are explained. For in 
that case we may believe that, as narrated in 
Acts i. 8, He showed Himself to His disci- 
ples ‘in many proofs,’ and thus evoked in 
them complete confidence that their Master had 
trampled death under His feet. If so, we can 
understand the courage which set at defiance 
the threats and the power of the most power- 
ful at Jerusalem. Men who on Friday saw 
Christ hanging on a cross, or knew that he was 
dead, and who on Sunday saw him living and 
strong, might well be fearless. For their Mas- 
ter was now manifestly Lord of Life and Death, 
and he had promised ever to be with them. 
Their fearless assertion that Christ had risen, 
in the face of men who had every motive for 
silencing them and apparently many means of 
doing so, would naturally convince many. And 
that many were convinced, the survival and 
spread of early Christianity proves. If 
Christ rose, we can understand how Paul’s con- 
tact with Christians, while dragging them be- 
fore courts of law, would help to his conver- 
sion. For we can easily conceive that, as he 
listened to their straightforward statements of 
fact, and possibly to their account of the teach- 


An Untenable Theory 83 


ing of Christ, he would find it more and more 
difficult to resist the accumulating evidence that 
the Crucified One was indeed the hoped-for 
Deliverer. This slowly dawning and growing 
conviction would prepare the way for the crisis 
which raised it at once to complete certainty. 
Thus the actual resurrection of Christ would 
abundantly account for the early spread of 
Christianity. It would also account for the 
effect of the Gospel upon the world.’ On the 
other hand, if Christ did not rise, the belief 
of His early followers, and the effect of the 
Gospel upon the world, are incapable of explana- 
tion. We have the most prodigious effects for 
which we can assign no adequate cause. 

Of one thing we may be sure, such effects 
could not have been produced by men con- 
sciously propagating a fraud. Falsehood could 
never have been so potent and beneficent. If 
so, honesty, sincerity and truthfulness are 
qualities and forces we need not seek. For in 
a great historic crisis dishonesty and falsehood 
did more for the world than all sincerity and 
truth ever did before. The resurrection of Je- 
sus is more credible than that falsehood was ever 
able to bear and do so much. The theory of 
fraud is untenable. 


‘Joseph Agar Beet’s “The Credentials of the Gos: 
pel,” pages 122, 123. 


84 An Idle Fancy 


Is the theory of hallucination a more credible 
explanation of the wide-spread belief in the fact 
of the resurrection which St. Paul’s Epistles to 
the Galatians, Corinthians and Romans show to 
have been in the earth within less than thirty 
years after the crucifixion ? 

No serious account need be taken of the idle 
fancy which has been put forth by some, viz.: 
that Jesus did not die at the crucifixion, that 
he was taken down in a swoon from which he 
awoke in the sepulchre, that he succeeded in 
creeping out in an exhausted state and in going 
into a place of retirement, and that his credu- 
lous followers afterwards mistook this partial 
recovery for a resurrection. Absolutely ab- 
surd and unthinkable are the assumptions 
necessary to sustain such a theory. Can any 
sane man believe Jesus, the best man the world 
ever saw, lent himself to such a trick; that an 
exhausted man eluded his enemies, rolled the 
stone from the sepulchre, induced a few of his 
friends to lend themselves to his scheme, and 
help him to concealment; hid himself so effect- 
ually from the powerful foes who crucified him 
in the first instance that they never were able 
to overtake him again; deceived the majority 
of his friends, and from his place of hiding so 
inspired them with confidence in his resurrec- 
tion that they went forth making such converts 


A Phenomenal Credulity 85 


as Saul of Tarsus, and created a new world on 
the basis of a clumsy piece of jugglery which 
could not command even the momentary belief 
of the simplest people of the time, without the 
connivance of his enemies and the lunacy or 
falsehood of his friends? To put forth such a 
notion as this theory involves, in order to ex- 
plain the religious phenomena of the first cen- 
tury, 1s to exhibit a phenomenal credulity in 
the nineteenth or twentieth century. It is 
more credible to believe that the God has lived 
incarnate among men, died and has risen again, 
and that by his power he has brought to pass the 
history which has followed the life and death of 
Jesus of Nazareth, than to believe a Jewish 
carpenter, who was recovered from a swoon af- 
ter his crucifixion, could have so successfully 
escaped the sepulchre, and have imposed upon 
mankind any measure of faith in his resurrec- 
tion. 

But what of the “theory of visions,” put 
forth by Renan and others, to account for the 
wide-spread faith in the resurrection, which St. 
Paul’s four great Epistles show in existence so 
soon after the crucifixion ? 

According to this theory, this wide-spread 
belief in the resurrection of Jesus so soon after 
his crucifixion was due to the fact that certain 
followers of Jesus simultaneously fell victims 


86 “The Theory of Visions” 


to mental hallucinations, mistaking certain vis- 
lonary appearances, the creations of their over- 
wrought imaginations, for objective realities, 
until they came to believe that they had seen 
and conversed with him after the resurrection. 

It should be remarked at the outset of the dis- 
cussion of this theory, that if it be true the de- 
lusion of these men is unique in its form. 
Other men have believed they saw spirits— 
ghosts out of the flesh. But no one except them 
has ever affirmed that he saw and talked with 
a man after he was dead, not as a spirit, but in 
bodily reality. 

These men lacked the mental conditions re- 
quired for such an hallucination as the “vision 
theory” attributes to the early followers of Je- 
sus. One of three mental conditions must ex- 
ist before the mind can yield itself to an hallu- 
cination, viz.: prepossession, a fixed idea, or a 
state of expectancy. Far from these states ex- 
isting in the minds of the early disciples, there 
is not only no evidence to show the probability 
of such mental conditions among them, but ev- 
ery reason to believe that nothing was more 
improbable, both as concerns them and every 
other Jew of their times. The “preposses- 
sions,” if they had been affected by any, would 
have all been such as would have arisen from 
the conception of a political Messiah, who could 


Curious Visions These 87 


not be killed, rather than of a Spiritual Mes- 
siah who should die and rise again. Their 
“fixed ideas,” if they had possessed any, must 
have been in line with the carnal conceptions of 
their generation. Their “expectancy” was that 
of the current hope of Israel. The risen Jesus 
destroyed all the mental habits of a lifetime. 
He shattered every earthly hope entertained by 
them and their countrymen, and sent them 
forth to do a work which the unconverted Jew 
had not only never imagined, but to which he 
was absolutely opposed when it was proposed to 
him. The teaching of the Judaizers, as they 
appear in Paul’s letters to the Galatians and the 
Corinthians, show the direction that the hallu- 
cinations of the Apostles would have taken if 
they had become possessed of any. ‘The sim- 
plicity of the Gospel was an offense to the 
Judaizers. They desired a more Jewish God 
than Jesus. 

Again, why should the same form of halluci- 
nation have possessed the minds of so many 
and so different persons at the same time? ‘The 
impulsive Peter, the affectionate John, the 
stern James, the incredulous Thomas, and 
above five hundred more, St. Paul affirms, 
claimed to have seen the risen Jesus. Did all 
the followers of Jesus take to seeing visions, all 
of the same sort, and to mistaking them for 


88 What Cured the Vistonaries? 


realities? What is there in the story of Jesus 
which would thus draw together a company of 
men and women addicted to the habit of hallu- 
cination and would give them all the same bent 2 

Furthermore, if the appearances of Jesus 
were mere visions, why did they cease within a 
very limited time after the crucifixion—say 
forty days? What cured the visionaries of 
their hallucinations all at once? Why were 
they all cured simultaneously ? Why did not 
the distemper last them longer? Their visions, 
if only the product of imagination and enthu- 
silasm, ought to have intensified the emotional 
excitement from which they sprang, and thus 
have multiplied themselves as far into the fu- 
ture as these unhealthy minds could have en- 
dured to furnish soil for such a growth? But 
they suddenly ceased altogether. Such a phe- 
nomenon is against all human experience and 
contrary to every known law of mind. The 
theory of visions is incredible. 

Jesus must have risen from the dead, or the 
facts set forth in Paul’s letters to the Romans, 
the Corinthians and Galatians, which no man 
denies or can deny, have no adequate explana- 
tion. And this conclusion is further enforced 
by the considerations brought forth in the next 
chapter. 


I 


Vil 


ST. PAUL’S TESTIMONY CONTINUED, 
AND ITS CORROBORATION BY THE 
EXISTENCE OF THE CHURCH AND 
THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY 


“And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching 
vain, and your faith is also vain.”—St. Paul. 


“The words ‘Christ is risen from the dead’ should 
be well marked, and written with great letters. Each 
letter should be as large as a town. Yea, even as high 
as heaven, and broad as the earth, so that we see 
nothing, hear nothing, think nothing, know nothing 
beyond it.”—Martin Luther. 


“Which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him 
from the dead, and set him at his own right hand in 
the heavenly places, far above all principality, and 
power, and might, and dominion, and every name 
that is named, not only in this world, but also in 
that which is to come, and hath put all things under 
his feet, and gave him to be the head over all things 
to the Church, which is his body.”—From the Epistle 
to the Ephesians. 


Vil 


Sr. Paut’s Testimony CONTINUED, AND ITS 
CoRROBORATION BY THE EXISTENCE OF 
THE CHURCH AND THE History OF CHRIS- 
TIANITY. 


From the four unquestioned Epistles of St. 
Paul it is evident that within a few months 
after the crucifixion the church was reconstruc- 
ted on the foundation supplied by the belief 
that Jesus rose from the dead. It is necessary, 
therefore, for those who attribute this belief in 
his resurrection to either fraud or hallucina- 
tion on the part of the early disciples, to ac- 
count not alone for the belief, but for the church 
founded on that belief. Here is not only a 
creed but an institution. While the creed was 
forming and gaining new converts, as well as 
new articles, the old followers who had com- 
mitted themselves before the crucifixion to a 
temporal and political Messiah must be held to- 
gether and finally led to change front and at- 
tach themselves to a spiritual Messiah. We 
not only do not see these charter members of 
the kingdom dwindling away after the death of 


Jesus, as naturally would have been the case if 
91 


92 Spiritualism No Parallel 


he had not risen, but we see their numbers mar- 
velously augmented immediately after the cru- 
cifixion. Many of the people who were the 
bitterest foes of them and of their Master before 
he died, now became their most devoted friends, 
_ and the ardent advocates of his resurrection. 
: The institution which we call the church thus 
rises at once fair and strong out of the grave of 
Jesus. 

Men sometimes point to the professed revela- 
tions of Spiritualism as a parallel to the belief 
of the early disciples in the resurrection. But 
what great body of truth has spiritualism pro- 
duced analogous to the doctrines held by the 
church, as set forth in these four Epistles of St. 
Paul, and what institution has it created or 
influence has it exerted to renew the world and 
renovate mankind? “Spiritualism, with all its 
alleged powers of penetrating into the secrets 
of the unseen world and all similar marvels, 
has achieved nothing. But respecting the Gos- 
pel of the resurrection the great Christian Mis- 
sionary could write to those who had actual 
knowledge of the facts in the first of his extant 
letters, dating only twenty-three years from the 
crucifixion: ‘Remembering without ceasing 
your work of faith, and labor of love, and pa- 
tience of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ, be- 
fore God our Father, .... for our Gospel 


“A Vast Multitude’ 93 


came not unto you in word only, but also in 
power; ... . and ye became imitators of us 
and of the Lord; .... and how ye turned 
unto God from idols, to serve the living and 
true God; and to wait for His Son from 
heaven whom he raised from the dead, even 
Jesus.”” No just comparison can be instituted 
between an arid, barren spiritualism, produc- 
ing nothing more or better than the vacant 
stare of the ignorant and superstitious, and a 
fertile and fertilizing faith, renewing the face 
of the earth with the products of the Christian 
church and the Christian life. 

And in connection with the consideration of 
these facts, as recorded in the undisputed Epis- 
tles of St. Paul, we may glance forward to ob- 
serve that similar facts continued to spring up 
at a later day. Tacitus, Suetonius and Pliny all 
bear witness to the fact that Christianity was 
extensively prevalent in their day, and it may 
be remarked in passing that the most sceptical 
unbelievers of the records bearing the names of 
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John believe with- 
out hesitation these Pagan historians. Tacitus, 
writing in the first century, calls the Christians 
at Rome “ingens multitudo,” i. e., “a vast 
multitude.” In a letter addressed by Pliny 


*Prebendary Row’s “Historical Evidence of the 
Resurrection of Jesus,” pages 44, 45, 


94 Not a Vanishing Quantity 


the Younger to the Emperor Trajan, near the 
beginning of the second century, he says: “The 
contagion of this superstition has not merely 
pervaded the cities, but also all villages and 
country places.” He intimates that until its 
power had been restrained by persecution the 
spread of Christianity had caused the Pagan 
temples to be “almost deserted,” their solemni- 
ties to be “long intermitted,” and the victims 
for their altars to have been “almost without 
purchasers.” The belief and the church 
which arose so soon after the crucifixion were 
not spent forces a century later, but rather 
more powerful and prevalent. The same forces 
have continued until this day. 

Christianity is not a vanishing quantity, but 
a constantly increasing power. It was intro- 
duced into the world by human instruments 
the most feeble and despised. It has tri- 
umphed over opposition the most malignant 
and potent. It made no concessions to sin or 
selfishness. It relied on no instrumentality of 
force or worldly wisdom to win its way. It 
availed itself of no favorable current in the pop- 
ular opinion prevalent among either Jews or 
Pagans. It cleansed Jews of their narrow- 
ness, and purged Pagans of their moral pollu- 
tion and of their corrupting idolatries. 

If Christ be not risen, these effects are inex- 


Inadequate Explanations 95 


plicable. The solution of them by Gibbon, as 
originally put forth by that sceptical historian, 
nor the revision of that solution by Mr. Lecky, 
is an adequate explanation of these results. 
Gibbon explains the rapid spread of Christian- 
ity by the “zeal” of the early Christians, ‘the 
doctrine of a future life,” “the miraculous pow- 
ers ascribed to the primitive church,” “the pure 
and austere morals of the first Christians,” and 
“the union and discipline of the Christian re- 
public.” But as Canon Liddon truly remarks, 
“Each of these causes points at once and irre- 
sistibly to a cause beyond itself. If the zeal 
of the first Christians was, as Gibbon will have 
it, a fanatical habit of mind inherited from Ju- 
daism, how came it not merely to survive, but 
to acquire a new intensity, when the narrow na- 
tionalism which provoked it in the Jew had 
been wholly renounced? What was it that 
made the first Christians so zealous amid sur- 
rounding lassitude, so holy amid encompassing 
pollution? Why should the doctrine of a life 
to come have had a totally different effect when 
proclaimed by the Apostles from any which it 
had had when taught by Socrates or by Plato, or 
by other thinkers of the Pagan world? How 
came it that a few peasants or tradesmen could 
erect a world-wide organization sufficiently elas- 
tic to adapt itself to the genius of races the 


96 Multiplying Marvels 


most various, sufficiently uniform to: be every- 
where visibly conservative of its unbroken 
identity? If the miracles of the early church 
or any of them were genuine, how can they 
avail to explain the naturalness of the spread 
of Christianity? If they were all false, how 
extraordinary is this spectacle of a moral tri- 
umph, such as even Gibbon acknowledges that 
of Christianity to be, brought about by means 
of a vast and odious imposition.” _ 

Mr. Lecky, in his “History of European 
Morals,” explains the success of Christianity 
by the “elements of power and attraction” 
combined in it; its freedom from “‘local ties” ; 
its strong appeal to the affections; its “pure 
and noble system of ethics”; its doctrines of 
“the brotherhood of man,” and of the “su- 
preme sanctity of love”; its “ideal of compas- 
sion and love”; “the congruity of its teaching 
with the spiritual nature of mankind.” But 
these lofty characteristics of Christianity are 
themselves effects which call for explanation. 
They can not be the final cause of the religion 
which produced them. Mr. Lecky merely 
analyzes the mystery and catalogues some of 
its parts, and by subdivision of the wonder 
multiplies the marvels which call for explana- 
tion. 

Let the agencies, human and superhuman, 


?Liddon’s “Bampton Lectures,” pages 135, 136, 


Jesus Risen Explains Christianity 97 


which wrought the early and later triumphs of 
Christianity be what they may, it remains that 
no such results could have been accomplished if 
Jesus had not risen from the dead. Too much 
was involved in that event for anything but fail- 
ure without it. Christianity, persistent and 
powerful, since a few months after the cruci- 
fixion, is the visible and increasing proof that 
Jesus has risen. Paul argued to the Corin- 
thians, “If Christ be not risen, then is our 
preaching vain and your faith is also vain.” 
The converse is also true, if neither the preach- 
ing nor the faith have been vain, it is because 
Christ has risen. Because his early followers 
“believed, as we believe, that He was God in 
the form of a servant, and in the likeness of 
sinful men, therefore the Jews accepted a mar- 
tyred Galilean as their Messiah, and the Greeks 
and Romans a crucified Jew as their God, and 
the fierce Northern hordes exchanged their 
warrior deities for the peaceful, suffering hu- 
miliation of the white Christ. And what is it 
the modern theorists ask us to believe? They | 
ask us to believe that eighteen hundred years 
ago there lived in the most despised village of 
the most despised province of a conquered land 
a man (and here I may be pardoned for that 
which a Christian may well shudder to re- 
peat)—a man, unlearned and ignorant, and 
not free from sin—the son of peasant parents, 


98 The Demand of “Modern Theorists” 


who, after having lived thirty years in the 
deepest obscurity, as a village carpenter, came 
forth for three years to preach a doctrine 
which had no originality, a doctrine which is 
often self-contradictory, always defective, ex- 
aggerated and impractical, and that when this 
fantastic pietist, half dreamer, half deceiver, 
made claims so violently opposed to His own 
clearest teachings that he suffered a slave’s 
death for treason and blasphemy His fol- 
lowers grossly falsified the events of His ordi- 
nary life, and though they were men whose 
lives and teaching showed that they would 
rather ‘die than lie,’ yet, suddenly transformed 
by this utter failure and shameful death from 
coward fugitives into dauntless missionaries, 
they either invented or imagined an ignorant 
story about his resurrection, in attestation of 
which they were ever ready, with demented en- 
—thusiasm, to face the wild beast and stand un- 
daunted in the flame; and that on this empty 
teaching and this invented tale was built a 
church which, after eighteen centuries, is still 
invincible in proportion to its purity and its 
faith, and were founded the institutes of a 
new kingdom of God, which ‘with the irresist- 
ible might of weakness,’ rising up between an 
effete Judaism and guilty heathendom, revolu- 


Has a Delusion Saved the World? 99 


tionized and overcome the world.” Such 
theories are “a vast incongruous heap of absurd- 
ities and impossibilities.” History, ancient 
and modern, attests the resurrection of Jesus. 

This conclusion is strongly stated in the 
Fernley lecture of 1889, thus: 

“Tf Christ did not rise, a delusion has saved 
the world. 

“In the days of Christ, the apparently hope- 
less world was sinking helplessly into social 
chaos. Gradually out of the chaos we have 
seen new life rising, until at last it has nearly 
overspread the earth. The nations which have 
received it stand to-day in the front rank. And 
to these the most hopeful of other nations are 
looking. In the social life of our own coun- 
try we see the moral influence of Christianity. 
If these influences were removed, there would 
be in modern life a void which nothing could 
fill. 

“All these results have flowed from the 
preaching of men who, but for the courage in- 
spired by a belief that their Master had risen 
from the dead, would never havedared to preach, 
or certainly would not have devoted their lives 
to the unwearied proclamation of the Gospel. 
Especially are these results due to the preaching 


®Canon Farrar’s “Witness of History to Christ,” 
pages 86, 87. 


100 “The Most Astounding Delusion” 


of one who gave proof of the strength and sin- 
cerity of his belief by forsaking in the noonday 
of his life the murderers of Christ and joining 
the company of his persecuted followers. 

“Now, if Christ did not actually rise, this 
belief was a delusion. And it is the most as- 
tounding delusion that ever darkened the 
erring mind of man. For not only did it ena- 
ble its early votaries to set at naught hardship 
and peril and death, but in all succeeding ages 
it has held captive many of the most intelli- 
gent and cultured men, and now for many cen- 
turies nearly all the best men. Unquestiona- 
bly it occupies a position without parallel 
among the delusions of mankind. 

“That delusion has saved the world. For, 
as we have seen, had not the early preachers of 
the Gospel been deluded about the historic fact 
of the resurrection of Christ, they would never 
have preached, there would have been no Chris- 
tian churches and no Christianity, the one in- 
fluence which has saved the world from ruin 
would not have existed, and the world would 
have perished. 

“Tf this be so, we owe to delusion and to er- 
ror a debt greater than we can conceive. 

“Fortunate it was for the world that the 
early Christians were so easily deceived by the 
creations of their own imagination. Had Pe- 


A Fortunate Delusion 101 


ter and John been men of cooler and keener in- 
telligence, instead of preaching that Christ had 
risen, they would have sought out his grave, 
and found that his body was still there, or they 
would have found that it had never been given 
to his friends (as is stated expressly in each 
of the four Gospels), but had become indistin- 
guishable in some trench in which the other 
criminals were buried. Then would the tri- 
umph of Annas and Caiaphas have been com- 
plete, the Galileans would have crept back to 
their fishing and Jesus would have been remem- 
bered as the last and greatest of the prophets. 
“Fortunate it was for the world that the 
scholar of Gamaliel was so easily led astray by 
the fishermen of Gennesaret. If the author of 
the Epistle to the Romans had been armed with 
the keen weapons of modern historical criticism, 
he would not only have escaped, but would 
have done much to dispel the delusion to which 
he fell a victim. For he would have persecu- 
ted the Christians to the end; or, if he had come 
to a better mind, would have explained to Peter 
and John that the real grandeur of Christ lay 
not in his supposed resurrection from the dead 
and superhuman dignity, but in the purity of 
his life and the loftiness of his moral teaching. 
Or, more likely, he would have pointed them to 
the closed grave in which their Lord lay dead. 


102 A’ Ploth Appenaiie” 


The result we can conjecture. In that grave, 
amid the ridicule of the enemies of Christ, 
would have been buried the hope of the 
world. 

“A plain alternative is before us. If Christ 
did not rise, in a manner revealing the presence 
of a power greater than the known forces of the | 
material world, and thus proving the justness 
of His stupendous claims, a delusion has 
turned back the entire current of human history 
and saved the world. If so, in the greatest 
crisis of the world’s history, delusion has been 
better than knowledge, and error better than 
truth. If we accept this supposition, we may 
well be pardoned if we prefer delusion to 
knowledge, error to truth. 

“Note now the logical consequence of the 
only alternative open to those who deny or 
doubt that Christ rose from the dead. In all 
ages men have sought knowledge, and some 
have made it under difficulties the chief aim 
of life, in the belief that to know the truth is 
for man’s highest interest, and that the truth is 
able to repay any price at which it may be pur- 
chased. The majesty of truth is now de- 
throned. For we have seen that it may be 
either a gain or possibly an infinite injury. 
This uncertainty makes knowledge unworthy of 
serious effort, especially of prolonged and diffi- 


“The Lord is Risen Indeed” 103 


cult and costly effort. Thus in the closed grave 
of Christ is buried, not only the world’s hope, 
but the chief stimulus for intelligent re- 
search.’” 

We can not accept a theory which thus bhe- 
reaves Hope and afflicts Truth. We can not 
leave those angelic forms, like Mary, weeping 
at the sepulchre in the gray dawn of the morn- 
ing, declaring, “They have taken away our 
Lord, and we know not where they have laid 
” The voice of history comforts them 
with authority and tenderness, declaring to 
them, “the Lord is risen indeed and hath ap- 
peared unto Simon,” and “unto James,” and 
unto “all the Apostles,” and unto Paul and 
unto “above five hundred brethren at once,” 
and hath shown himself mighty to save by a 
a great multitude which no man can number, 
of all nations and kindreds and peoples and 
tongues. 

Surely the God has appeared among men in 
Jesus of Nazareth, who “suffered under Pon- 


him 


tius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried, was 
raised again the third day and ascended into 
heaven,” leaving trailing clouds of glory be- 
hind Him on the earth. Dark indeed were the 
world if it were not so. All light would be 
extinguished and even the love of light would 
4Joseph Agar Beet’s “Credentials of the Gospel.” 


104 Joy and Hope Everywhere 


be hopelessly discouraged. If the First-born of 
Heaven had died, never to rise again, Egyptian 
darkness would have overspread the earth never 
to lift, and an inconsolable bereavement would 
have made a lamentation throughout the uni- 
verse. But rising He hath brought life and 
immortality to light, and joy and hope are 
everywhere, 


Vill 


HAS GOD APPEARED AMONG MEN? 
DID JESUS RISE FROM THE DEAD? 
THE TESTIMONY OF THE EVAN- 
GELISTS 


“This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are 
witnesses.”—St. Peter at Pentecost. 


“Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and 
John, and perceived that they were unlearned and 
ignorant men, they marvelled; and they took knowl- 
edge of them, that they had been with Jesus.” (Acts , 
1 ATT SD 


“And with great power gave the Apostles witness 
of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus: and great 
grace was upon them all.’ (Acts iv. 33.) 


“A man who will not believe the resurrection of 
Christ, upon a statement of these facts, would not 
believe it if he himself should rise from the dead.”— 
Dr. Robert South. 


Vill 


Has Gop ArprrarEep AMone Men? Drip JzEsus 
Rist From tHE Drap? Tuer TEsTIMony 
OF THE EVANGELISTS. 


In the preceding pages the testimony of the 
Evangelists has been set aside, and for proof 
of the resurrection of Jesus, the undisputed 
Epistles of St. Paul have been alone relied up- 
on. Having thus independently of their tes- 
timony established the fact that Jesus rose 
from the dead, any possible presumptions 
against the credibility of their writings on ac- 
count of the record of miracles which they con- 
tain is overcome, and we are now in position to 
consider them as historical documents. 

Let the evidences of their genuineness and 
authenticity be first considered, just as we 
would consider the proofs of the genuineness 
and authenticity of the writings of Josephus or 
Livy, or of the works of any other author, an- 
cient or modern. 

For the starting-point of the argument, the 
year 180 A. D. must be taken, because at that 
time it is allowed by both believers and unbe- 
lievers that the four Gospels, as we have them, 
were universally accepted in all the churches as 


the only valid account of the earthly life of 
107 


108 The Period of Fraud, if Committed 


Jesus. At that time the books were reverenced 
as Holy Scriptures, and their authorship was 
ascribed to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. 
If they be fraudulent documents, the fraud was 
concocted and imposed on the churches in the 
first half of the second century. 

St. John died about the year A. D. 100. It 
is evident that during his lifetime no spurious 
Gospels, containing false accounts of the life 
of Jesus, and purporting to be from the pens of 
himself and of his companions, could have 
gained general acceptation. The question, 
therefore, is, Did such unauthorized and un- 
truthful documents spring up between the year 
100 A. D. and the year 180 A. D., at which 
latter date our present Gospels were universally 
received by the churches? 

Before adducing personal testimony in an- 
swer to this question, a general observation is 
pertinent and important: Literary works in 
days when all books had to be copied by hand 
attained a general circulation far more slowly 
than can be easily imagined in this age of the 
printing-press. The multiplication and dis- 
tribution of copies of any book, as widely as the 
Gospels had been scattered by the year 180 
A. D. must have been the work of years. Only 
works of the most commanding interest could 
attain such a circulation at all. If twenty 


The Testimony of Irenaeus 109 


years be allowed for this work—in the case of 
the Gospels, a period none too long—we reduce 
the period from eighty to sixty years, during 
which, if they were fabricated by impostors, 
they must have been produced. Both for the 
longer and the shorter period positive testimony 
exists showing conclusively that the Gospels uni- 
versally accepted in the year 180 A. D. had been 
known and received from the days of the 
Apostles, and were none other than the docu- 
ments which we now have. 

The testimony of Irenaeus, Bishop of Ly- 
ons, is of the first importance. He knew Poly- 
carp, and Polycarp had known St. John and 
others “who had seen the Lord.” In remon- 
strating with Florinus, one of his early friends, 
who had fallen into heresy, contrary to the 
teaching of the “Elders who also were disciples 
of the Apostles,” he says: “I can describe the 
very place in which the blessed Polycarp used 
to sit when he discoursed, and his goings out 
and his comings in, and his manner of life, and . 
his personal appearance, and the discourses | 
which he held before the people, and how he 
would describe his intercourse with John and 
with the rest who had seen the Lord, and how he 
would relate their words.” 

Is it probable or possible that Irenaeus 
would have allowed the genuineness and au- 


110 Was Polycarp Deceived? 


thenticity of spurious Gospels—especially one 
claiming John for its author—of which Poly- 
carp had known nothing, and which he there- 
fore never acknowledged? Could Polycarp 
have been deceived about such a grave matter, 
and if he was not deceived, could his pupil, 
who professes such vivid recollections of him, 
have been deceived? Let us hear, then, what 
Irenaeus says. In his great work, “Against 
Heresies,” in which he uses the books of the 
New Testament as freely and with the same 
reverence as a modern theologian of the most 
orthodox school, he declares of the four Gos- 
pels: ‘So firm is the ground on which these 
Gospels rest that the very heretics themselves 
bear witness to them, and, starting from these 
documents, each one of them endeavors to estab- 
lish his own peculiar doctrine.” 

In the passage from which this quotation is 
taken, he goes on to name the four Gospels by 
the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, 
and to insist that there could be only four Gos- 
pels. The fanciful reason which he gives for 
this view concerning their number in nowise 
weakens the force of his testimony to the fact 
of their existence, but does rather immensely 
strengthen it, for when a fact is made the basis 


1Trenaeus’s “Against Heresies” (Ante-Nicene Li- 
brary), Vol. I., page 292. 


Clement, Tertullian and Justin Martyr 111 


of a theory, the fact itself is evidently beyond 
dispute. 

Again, Clement of Alexandria, who pre- 
sided over a great Christian school in that city 
from A. D. 190 to A. D. 203, tells us that the 
motive for writing his “Stromata”’ was that in 
his old age he might not forget the great dis- 
courses he had heard in early manhood from 
men who had derived the tradition of the faith 
from the Apostles, Peter, James, John and 
Paul. In that work, when commenting upon a 
statement in an apocryphal Gospel, he remarks 
that it is not found “in the four Gospels which 
have been handed down to us.”” 

To the same purpose speaks Tertullian of 
Carthage, who lived between the years 150 A. 
D. to 220 A. D. In his treatise against Mar- 
cion he affirms that the four Gospels have ex- 
isted from “the very beginning,” and are “co- 
eval with the churches themselves,’ referring 
particularly to the churches founded by the 
Apostles in person. 

Let the testimony of Justin Martyr next be 
taken. He was put to death for being a Chris- 
tian not later than 166 A. D., when, after ex- 
tensive studies in various schools of philosophy, 
he had been converted about A. D. 130. In 
his Furst Apology, he tells us: “On the day 


?Stromata, 111, 553 (Potter Ed.). *Adv. Marcion iv. 5, 


112 Justin Martyr and Tatian 


called Sunday, all who live in cities, or in the 
country, gather together to one place, and the 
Memovrs of the Apostles or the writings of the 
prophets are read as long as time permits.” 
Again, as showing what he meant by “Mem- 
oirs,’ he says: “The Apostles, in the 
Memoirs composed by them, which are called 
Gospels, have thus delivered unto us what was 
enjoined upon them.” In another place he 
characterizes them as “Memoirs drawn up by 
the Apostles: and those who followed them.” 
In his writings there are 196 references to 
things recorded in our present Gospels, show- 
ing clearly the source from which he drew his 
knowledge of apostolic days and the high es- 
teem in which he held it. The Diatessaron of 
Tatian, who was a pupil of Justin, shows that 
the “Memoirs” to which he alludes were the 
four Gospels. Tatian combined the Gospels 
into one narrative—a sort of harmony—which 
strangely enough begins with the opening pas- 
sage of John’s Gospel, about which there has 
been so much controversy. 
Omitting to consider the evidence for the 
genuineness of the Gospels which might be ad- 
duced from the quotations from them made by 
Polycarp and other Apostolic Fathers, and from 
the use made of them by heretical leaders, such 
as Marcion, in the first half of the second cen- 


Testimony of Papias 113 


tury, we pass on to examine the testimony of 
Papias, bishop of Hierapolis in Phrygia, who 
was born sometime between A. D. 60 and A. 
D. 70, and who published a book entitled, “An 
Exposition of the Oracles of the Lord,” about 
A. D. 183. This work of Papias has been lost, 
the latest record of the existence of the book 
itself being that it was in the Cathedral at 
Nismes, A. D. 1218. But fragments of it have 
been preserved by Eusebius, from which “It 
appears that (1) Papias knew men who were 
friends of many of the original Apostles; that 
(2) he knew two women who were daughters 
of the Apostle Philip; that (3) he knew two 
men who were immediate disciples of the 
Lord; that (4) he had tried to learn from all 
these persons what they could tell him about 
Christ, and about what had been said by the 
Apostles about Christ ; and that (5) he had used 
what they had told him in his Exposition.” 
This ancient writer, as quoted by Eusebius, 
says: “And the Elder (the Elder John) said 
this also: ‘Mark, having become the interpreter 
of Peter, wrote down accurately everything 
that he remembered, without, however, record- 
ing in order what was either said or done by 
Christ. For neither did he hear the Lord, nor 


‘Dr. R. W. Dale’s “Living Christ and the Four Gos- 
pels,” page 226. 
8 


114. The Force of Papias’s Testumony 


did he follow Him, but afterwards as I said 
(attended) Peter, who adapted his instructions 
to the needs (of his hearers) but had no design 
of giving a connected account of the Lord’s 
oracles (or discourses).’ So, then, Mark made 
no mistake, while he thus wrote down some 
things as he remembered them; for he made it 
his one care not to omit anything he heard, or 
to set down any false statement therein.” 
Concerning the Gospel by Matthew, he says: 
“So then Matthew composed the oracles in the 
Hebrew language and each one interpreted 
them as he could.’”” 

After all that hostile critics have been able 
to suggest to impair the force of this testi- 
mony of Papias, it remains as immovable evi- 
dence establishing the existence of these Gos- 
pels in the early part of the Second Century, 
connecting them immediately with apostolic 
authorship, and placing them upon the level of 
divine “Oracles.” And “Oracles” was the title 
given to sacred books. To Paul, the ancient 
scriptures of the Jewish people were “Oracles 
of God.” To Philo, the great Jewish scholar 
of Alexandria, the narrative parts of the Old 
Testament, as well as the words of J ehovah, 
were “Oracles.” To Clement of Rome, the 
Jewish Scriptures were also “Oracles of God.” 

'Buseb. Hist. Eccl., vi. 30. 


The Combined Testimony HS 


“When Papias gives this great title to the narra- 
tives of Matthew and Mark, he attributes to 
them the same dignity, the same authority, the 
same sacredness, that was attributed to the books 
of the Old Testament.’” Is it possible that 
books held in such reverence and affection by 
Papias and his contemporaries as late as 135 
A. D. could have been absolutely lost, and 
other documents of a less commanding charac- 
ter have usurped their names and occupied their 
place in all the Christian churches in less than 
fifty years thereafter? It is incredible! One 
might as well believe that “The Code Napo- 
leon” displaced the Constitution of the United 
States in the mind of the people of the United 
States, sometime between the days of President 
Jackson and President Garfield, without at- 
tracting the notice of the highest legal authori- 
ties, or incurring the opposition of the nation. 
And now, with all the testimonies before us— 
the combined evidence of Irenaeus, Clement of 
Alexandria, Tertullian, Justin Martyr, Tatian 
and Papias—not to mention such proof as is 
found in the writings of Marcion, and the doc- 
ument discovered by Bryennios at Constanti- 
nople as late as 1881, entitled “The Teaching 
of the Twelve Apostles,” which carries us back 


*Dr. R. W. Dale’s “Living Christ and the Four Gos- 
pels,” page 243, 


116 An Impossible Fraud 


as far as A. D. 140, and perhaps to A. D. 120 
—can we reasonably doubt that the Gospels 
which were universally accepted in A. D. 180 
and which have come down to us, are both gen- 
uine and authentic? Is it not indisputable 
that men who had known Apostles and others 
who had known companions of the Apostles de- 
clare that written records of the life of Jesus — 
by apostolic authors existed in their day and 
from the very beginning of Christianity? Did 
the universal church, including churches 
so widely separated as Hierapolis, Carthage, 
Alexandria, Lyons, Corinth and Ephesus, suf- 
fer these original works of apostolic authority 
to perish, and fall with unimaginable haste 
to copying and circulating spurious Gospels as 
the “Oracles of God,” so that in the year 180 
A. D. the genuine Gospels had entirely disap- 
peared? What motive induced such a revolu- 
tion among the immediate followers of the 
Apostles in the early days of the second cen- 
tury? Who were the men equal to such a task? 
How did such remarkable men incline to hide — 
themselves and how did they manage to conceal 
themselves so perfectly, that all the scholars of 
the ages, including the microscopic critics of 
modern rationalism, have failed to uncover and 
identify them? How did they succeed in ac- 
complishing so great a fraud in an age when 


A Theory Not Arguable lyf 


there were no printing-presses, and when copy- 
ists, who issued so many Gospels that all the 
churches came to possess their fraudulent books, 
would have been so open to discovery and so 
easy of detection? Truly, as Dr. Dale says: 
“That books which commanded such affection 
and reverence among the friends of men who 
had known the original Apostles—books to 
which they attributed so great an authority, 
books which they regarded as Sacred Scrip- 
tures—should have been suffered to disappear 
within a _ single generation, leaving no 
trace behind them, and that they should 
have been immediately replaced by other 
books inheriting their names and _ inher- 
iting their sacredness; that the Christian 
churches in every part of the world, in Rome, 
in Carthage, in Alexandria, in Jerusalem, in 
Asia Minor, in Southern Gaul, should have 
silently consented to part with the old Gos- 
pels and to receive the new; and that they 
should all have believed that the new were the 
same as the old—this is impossible. Strip the 
theory of the infinite ingenuity, the learning, 
the brilliance of exposition by which its real 
form and nature have been concealed, and it 
ceases to be even arguable. The miracles re- 
corded in the Four Gospels, these are credible; 
but the miracles which this hypothesis requires 


118 Internal Evidences 


us to receive are incredible. For, if it is true, 
then there was a suspension of some of the most 
ordinary and certain laws of human thought 
and conduct, a suspension extending over many 
years and operating in tens of thousands of 
men, belonging to different races and living in 
many lands. This is asking men to believe too 
much; the demands of the new criticism are 
more exorbitant than the demands of the old 
faith.” 

Besides this positive testimony of personal 
witnesses to the genuineness and authenticity of 
the Four Gospels, the books contain internal 
evidences—local and personal references, indi- 
vidual peculiarities and striking coincidences, 
such as no counterfeiter of a later day could 
have brought into them—which confirm the con- 
clusion that, as they were held py the churches 
180 A. D., and as they are known to us to-day, 
they are the work of the writers whose names 
they bear, and are trustworthy memoirs of the 
life of Jesus. 

But if the date and authorship of these Gos- 
pels were a matter of insoluble doubt and in- 
determinable uncertainty, there is no good rea- 
son to question the general trustworthiness of 
their statements. From them we derive all we 


‘The Living Christ and the Four Gospels,” pages 
244, 245. 


Did the Writers Speak the Truth? 119 


know of Jesus, a character so real and so un- 
imaginable that no writer could have invented 
it. No other tradition of Him was accepted by 
either the friends or foes of Christianity in the 
second century, and no other has been allowed 
at any subsequent time. Whether these docu- 
ments are, or are not, the work of Matthew, 
Mark, Luke and John; whether they are, or are 
not, inspired; whether “Oracles of God’ or 
compositions of men, they are the testimony of 
very ancient writers to the life, the words, and 
the deeds of Jesus, the eminent Jew, who ap- 
peared in Palestine during the reign of Tibe- 
rius, and whose history has so mightily affected 
all subsequent times. 

The question before us now is: Did these 
writers speak the truth when they affirmed that 
after his crucifixion under Pontius Pilate, his 
death and his burial, he rose from the dead ? 

They are to be believed, unless it can be 
shown that they intended to deceive, or were 
themselves deceived. 

If they intended to deceive, how shall we ac- 
count for their general tone of candor and 
truthfulness? They tell their story in the 
dispassionate manner of truthful witnesses. 
They indulge in no epithets or eulogies. Is 
this the manner of men when perpetrating a 
fraud—and a fraud so great ? 


120 Too Candid for Imposture 


Claiming to be actors in the story which 
they tell, they relate things discreditable to 
themselves. They report their worldly ambi- 
tions and sinful rivalries, and faithfully give 
the reproofs which Jesus administered to them. 
They tell how one of their number denied Him 
and that at the last they all forsook Him and 
fled. Now, if these writings are from the 
Apostles themselves they show a stern honesty 
utterly incompatible with intentional deceit. 
If, on the other hand, they are the pseudony- 
mous productions of men writing under apos- 
tolic names, it is required to show why impos- 
tors would write books intended to circulate 
among the followers of the Apostles and insert 
in them accounts derogatory of them? How 
would this commend the books to their follow- 
ers? Would any impostor—least of all one 
capable of composing either of the Gospels— 
ever hit upon such a device, or rather ever per- 
petrate such a blunder ? 

Moreover, men who propagated such a story 
as the resurrection, at the time when these Gos- 
pels were put forth, could not have escaped 
persecution for their pains. Martyrdom was 
most frequently the price paid for giving such 
testimony. Is there anything in conscious 
deceit of the most stupendous character to in- 
spire, or sustain, the martyr spirit? Are false- 


The Circumstantial Surroundings 121 


hoods uttered to incur or to escape pain? Are 
they invented to secure self-advantage or impose 
self-sacrifice ? 

All the circumstantial surroundings amid 
which the facts of the resurrection are placed by 
the narratives of the Evangelists exclude the 
possibility of fraud or delusion. Jesus dies at 
the time of the Passover, the greatest feast of 
the Jews, which drew thousands to Jerusalem, 
where he was tried and executed. His trial 
and crucifixion by the civil government, at the 
instigation of the Sanhedrim, made it an object 
of interest to all the inhabitants of the city and 
to the visitors to the feast. The nation for 
months had been agitated by his ministry, and 
he had entered the city shortly before his trial 
amid the hosannas of the multitude. The story 
of his resurrection was anticipated by his ene- 
mies, and precautions taken against the possi- 
bility of its being believed. He was buried, 
the sepulchre was sealed with the proconsular 
seal, and a guard was set to watch it. Now, 
with the body of Jesus thus entombed and 
guarded, one of three things must have taken 
place, viz.: (1) The body lay in the sepulchre; 
(2) it was stolen away; (3) or he rose from 
the dead. 

Did it continue in the sepulchre and return 
to dust? If so, how shall we account for the 


122 Which of Three Theories? 


existence and faith of the Church at Jerusa- 
lem, which we have seen from the undisputed. 
Epistles of St. Paul sprang into being immedi- 
ately after the crucifixion Why did not the 
enemies of the new and disquieting doctrine 
produce the body and thus summarily end the 
mischievous superstition? What rallied so 
quickly the followers who forsook him and fled 
at the first approach of the soldiers who ar- 
rested him and carried him from Gethsemane to 
his trial ? 

Was the body stolen away? How could any- 
one have spirited it away without detection at 
the time of the Passover when the full moon 
made the nights like day, and the attention of 
thousands was fixed on that sepulchre in the 
garden, around which a company of Roman sol- 
diers kept watch? But if it were stolen, who 
committed the theft? His enemies? Then, 
why did they not produce it as soon as the res- 
urrection—which, if it were indeed a fact, im- 
plicated them in a monstrous erime—was pro- 
claimed in their city? They had every motive 
to produce it, and no earthly reason for not 
bringing it forth, if they had it) And ar 
he rose not, they could have had it, if they de- 
sired it. 

Did his disciples steal it? If so, how did 
they elude the guard? By bribery? For that 


One Explanation Possible 123 


they were too poor. Did they force the guard ? 
For that they were too timid. But if they ob- 
tained it by either bribery or force, or by both, 
why were they never charged with the offense, 
and executed for it, as they most assuredly 
would have been if guilt could have been fixed 
upon them ? 

But, again, if they had on their hands the 
mangled, lifeless, putrefying body of Jesus, 
whence came the faith in their hearts? 
Whence their courage? Whence their zeal? 
Whence the power over the people—over some 
even who were concerned in the crucifixion of 
their Lord—so that they were able to establish 
churches at Jerusalem, Antioch, Corinth, and 
the cities of Galatia and Macedonia, ultimately 
establishing a church even in the great and dis- 
tant capital, Rome? Could a conscious fraud 
so revive and invigorate them, raising their 
natural abilities to almost infinite powers? 
Could a delusion so enthrall and empower 
them? Did an hallucination ever so stimu- 
late faith, elevate virtue and conquer the world ? 

The facts of the case admit of but one ex- 
planation. Jesus rose from the dead. From 
different lines of investigation—from the undis- 
puted Epistles of St. Paul and from the unaf- 
fected narratives of the Evangelists—we reach 
the same conclusion. It must be so. Nothing else 


194. “We Have Not Followed Fables” 


can be true. “The world itself is changed, and 
is no more the same that it was; it has never 
been the same since Jesus left it. The air is 
charged with heavenly odors, and a kind of ce- 
lestial consciousness, a sense of other worlds, 
is wafted on us in its breath.” ‘We have not 
followed cunningly devised fables.” (2 Peter 
i. 16.) “He has received from God the Father 
honor and glory.” (2 Peteri. 11.) He is con- 
vincingly “declared to be the Son of God with 
power according to the Spirit of Holiness, by 
the resurrection from the dead.” (Romans i. 4.) 


‘Bushnell’s “Nature and the Supernatural,” 


Wa Oe a 


IX 


HAS GOD APPEARED AMONG MEN? 
THE WITNESS OF HISTORY TO THE 
DIVINITY OF JESUS 


“God, who at sundry times and in divers manners 
spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, 
hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, 
whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom 
also he made the worlds.’—Epistle to the Hebrews. 


“The greatest of the proofs of Jesus Christ are the 
prophecies. . . . Hven if one man had made a 
book of predictions of Jesus Christ as to the time 
and manner of his coming, and if Jesus Christ had 
come in conformity with these prophecies, this would 
be of infinite weight. But there is here a great deal 
more. There is a succession of men who, during four 
thousand years, constantly and without variation, 
come one after another, predicting the same event. 
There is a whole people which announces him, and 
which subsists during four thousand years in order 
still to render their testimony of the assurances 
which they have of him, from which they can not be 
turned aside by any menaces or any persecutions 
which befell them.”—Pascal. 


“The memory of His life has been like the perfume 
of another world, and all history is incomprehen- 
sive without Him.’—Renan. 


The kingdoms of this world are become the king- 
doms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall 
reign forever and ever, (Hevelation xi, 15.) 


EX 
Has Gop AppEaRED Amona Men? Tue Wir: 


NESs oF HISTORY TO THE DIVINITY OF 
JESUS. 


A recent God is a pretender, a worn-out God 
has abdicated, a transient God is a provisional 
sovereign, and a local God is a provincial ruler. 
The true God can be none of these. He is not 
recent, but from everlasting to everlasting. 
There is no past during which he did not rule. 
He is not obsolete, but the Eternal “I Am.” 
There is no present from which he is absent. 
He is not transient, for his dominion is “an 
everlasting dominion which shall not pass 
away.” No future shall ever come over 
which he will not be regnant. He is not local, 
for his name is excellent in all the earth and 
his glory is set above the heavens. No part of 
the earth or the universe ever was, or ever can 
be, beyond his presence and his power. When 
he appears among men, if he should appear, all 
history, past, present and future must witness 
to him as to One whose purpose runs through 
the ages and whose appearance to mortal men is 
in furtherance of that purpose. There must 


be cosmical congruity in his manifestation, 
127 


128 Is Jesus the Centre of History? 


otherwise men will perceive two Gods—a God 
of Providence moving in one direction, and a 
God of Revelation working in another—or 
they will perceive the appearance of a double- 
minded God. Is there such congruity in the 
case of Jesus? Does the history of the world 
witness to His Divinity ? 

By marvelous mathematics, astronomers, 
witnessing the perturbations of heavenly bodies 
visible to them, have located planets before be- 
ing able to bring them within the range of tel- 
escopic vision. They have surveyed the heav- 
ens and said, “Here a planet ought to be,” and 
behold, a more penetrating gaze has discovered 
it where and when they said it should appear! 
It was thus Professors Adams and Leverrier 
discovered the planet Neptune, by the pertur- 
bations of Uranus. May the careful student of 
history so calculate for the appearance of Je- 
sus? Were there perturbations in advance of 
Him which pointed to Him? Were there con- 
junctions in the age of Tiberius which called 
for Him? Do succeeding ages require Him for 
their explanation? Is he indeed, as Luthardt 
claims, “the end to which all ancient history 
tended,” and “the starting-point from which all 
modern history begins” ? 

If so, we have a sublime witness to his di- 
vinity which can never be obscured and which 


The Claim Made by Jesus 129 


can never be successfully denied. Before our 
faith thenceforth advances a pillar of cloud 
and of fire, unmistakably charged with the di- 
vine presence. 

Certainly if we may trust the Gospels as 
narratives, or the four undisputed epistles of 
Paul as records of faith, this was the claim 
which Jesus made for himself touching his 
position in history, and which his followers af- 
terwards insisted was a claim well founded. 

In defending one of the cures which he had 
wrought, Jesus said of God: “My father 
worketh even until now and I work” (John 
v. 17, Revised Version), thus associating 
himself with an active God who had never 
ceased to work, and declaring his own deeds as 
being of a piece with, and in continuance of, 
the activities of that Divine Agent. Again, he 
declared, “Before Abraham was I am” (John 
vill. 58)—a declaration which not only sug- 
gested to his hearers the Great “I am” of 
Moses at the burning bush, but which set him- 
self before them as one anterior to their na- 
tional founder and their national history, the 
God of nations as well as the God of Israel. He 
laid special claim to having been anticipated in 
the history, literature and religion of the He- 
brew nation, and to being the fulfiller of their 
hopes and the subject of their prophecies, say- 

9 


130 John the Baptist 


ing, “Think not that I am come to destroy the 
law, or the prophets; I am not come to destroy, 
but to fulfill.” (Matthew v. 17.) And again, 
“Search the Scriptures; for in them ye think 
ye have eternal life: and they are they which 
testify of me.” 

He is immediately preceded by a fore 
runner, John the Baptist, whose sole office 
is to prepare his way before him and who 
connects him with prophetic utterances which 
had been current in Israel for several centuries 
before Him: “As it is written in the prophets, 
Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, 
which shall prepare thy way before thee. The 
voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare 
ye the way of the Lord, make his paths 
straight.” (Mark i. 2,3.) He identifies ‘this 
prophet of the wilderness with the prophets 
who had in former centuries appeared in Israel, 
and makes John the terminal link by which he 
himself was bound to a living and unbroken 
chain of supernatural events and utterances: 
“For all the prophets and the law prophesied 
until John.” (Matthew xi. 18.) He declares 
of the Baptist that he was “a prophet” and 
“more than a prophet,” and the Baptist in 
turn connects Him with the Paschal lamb, which 
was the chiefest memorial of the Exodus from 
Egypt and the central offering of Israel’s wor- 


The Claim Made by His Followers 131 


ship and hope, saying, “Behold the Lamb of 
God which taketh away the sin of the world.” 
(John i. 29.) 

He not only claims to be the fulfiller of Is- 
rael’s past prophecies, and the Messiah which 
satisfied the mind and heart of John, the great- 
est of all prophets present in his time; but he 
projects his claims into the future, affirming, 
“Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my 
words shall not pass away.” (Matthew xxiv. 
35.) He commands his disciples to teach his 
words to the nations, and promises to be with 
them always, even unto the end of the world. 
(Matthew xxviii. 19, 20.) At the outset of 
his ministry he is as confident of his enduring 
influence as at its close. In the Sermon on the 
Mount he declares that in the final judgment 
the fate of souls will be fixed by the fact of obe- 
dience or disobedience to “these sayings of 
mine” (Matthew vii. 24)—“sayings” which he 
makes of equal authority with the will of the 
“Father which is in heaven.” 

The same sublime claim, that He was the ful- 
filler of the past, God manifest in the present, 
and the hope of the future, his followers made 
on his behalf. St. Peter writes of the salva- 
tion offered by him: “Of which salvation the 
prophets have inquired and searched dili- 
gently, who prophesied of the grace that should 


132 The Claim by Peter and Paul 


come unto you: searching what, or what man- 
ner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in 
them did signify, when it testified beforehand 
the sufferings of Christ, and the glory that 
should follow. Unto whom it was revealed, that 
not unto themselves, but unto us they did min- 
ister the things, which are now reported unto 
you by them that have preached the gospel unto 
you with the Holy Ghost sent down from 
heaven.” Enlarging the circle of Christ’s con- 
nection and the sweep of his authority to supra- | 
mundane spheres, the Apostle adds, “which 
things the angels desire to look into.” (1 Peter 
i. 10-12.) 

Paul identifies him with the promise to 
Abraham (Galatians ili. 16), and makes an 
allegory of the Abrahamic history to enforce the 
freedom of faith under Christ. (Galatians iv. 
22-31.) In his great argument for the resur- 
rection he sets forth that momentous fact not as 
an isolated marvel, having no roots in the past, 
but declares, “he rose again the third day ac- 
cording to the Scriptures.” (1 Corinthians 
xv. 4.) He tells the Romans that the hope of 
the Gospel had been promised by the prophets in 
the Holy Scriptures. (Romans i. 2.) 

To the same purpose speak all the writers 
of the New Testament. The first teachers of 
Christianity did not renounce their inheritance 


A Typical Instance 133 


in the past or in the faith of the Hebrew nation. 
They did not repudiate it as a bygone supersti- 
tion. They preached first and everywhere 
in the Synagogues, and reasoned with 
the people from the cogent premises of 
invincible Scriptures. The writer of the 
Acts gives us a typical instance: “Now when 
they had passed through Amphipolis and Apol- 
lonia, they came to Thessalonica, where was a 
synagogue of the Jews: And Paul, as his 
manner was, went in unto them, and three Sab- 
bath days reasoned with them out of the Scrip- 
tures, opening and alleging, that Christ must 
needs have suffered, and risen again from the 
dead.” (Acts xvii. 1-3.) 

This amazing claim of fulfilling the past is 
peculiar to Christianity. It is in this particu- 
lar unique among the religions which have chal- 
lenged the attention and demanded the sub- 
mission of mankind. ‘“Mohammedanism burst 
upon a terrified and astonished world without 
any voice or note of preparation, like the flash 
of its founder’s sword. Judaism in its most dis- 
tinctive and essential form was given to Israel 
but fifty days after the Exodus, and before that 
time Israel was not a nation. Of the origin of 
Brahmanism and Buddhism we know too little 
to speak with much definiteness; but there is 


134 The Taint of the Natural 


no vestige of preparation for one or the other 
in what we know of either.” 

Moreover, these religions have shown them- 
selves less than divine in that they have not 
been able to overcome the wideness of the earth 
nor resist the ravages of time. ‘They are cov- 
ered all over with the leprous taint of the nat- 
ural which is slowly but surely disintegrating 
them, and they cry from afar as the investigator 
approaches them, “Unclean! Unclean!” Space 
and time have taken the crowns from their 
heads, and the eternities disown them. They 
flee the light of modern civilization and crouch 
in an outer darkness, helpless and hopeless ; 
while Christianity, claiming to be endowed as 
the heir of the ages, unembarrassed under the 
glowing noontide of history, plans for the re- 
demption of the world by the forces of a King- 
dom which it declares shall never end. 

Can this amazing claim be made good? Is 
the Jesus of the Evangelists the Desire of all 
nations, the Messiah of the Hebrew prophets, 
and the Christ of history? If he is not, though 
the fact of his resurrection be established and 
the evidences of his power be all around us, 
they are mere blinding flashes which do but 
confuse and terrify us! We can not at this 


1“Qharacteristics of Christianity,” by Stanley 
Leathes, D.D., page 3. 


Too Late for Another 135 


point in the world’s history send to him ever 
the inquiry of the Baptist, “Art thou he that 
should come or do we look for another?” It is 
too late for another to come. If another should 
come all the presumptions would be against 
him, and he would stand no chance in a contest 
with Jesus for the acceptance of mankind. “It 
were easier to untwist all the beams of light in 
the sky, separating and expunging one of the 
colors, than to get the character of Jesus out of 
the world!” If Jesus be not God, He who is 
God has waited too long to come to the earth to 
make his coming worth while. The race of man 
would now meet him with fierce indignation or 
languid indifference, declaring “hope deferred 
hath made the heart sick”—too sick for heal- 
ing or for love. If Jesus be not God, He who is 
God has lost his chance with men. He has dis- 
appointed the past, the world forces of the 
present are bent away from him, and the future 
is irretrievably lost to him. Jesus has shut up 
the world, when the case eventually reaches its 
final issue, to atheism or faith in Him, because 
the world’s history has no centre nor purpose 
if it is not organized around Him. 


Is history atheistic or Christian? Have 
events fallen out in a purposeless, haphazard 
fashion, or have they marched from the begin- 


?Bushnell’s “Nature and the Supernatural,” page 331. 


136 Attend to the Facts 


ning, and do they continue to advance to “a 
divine event,” the coronation of Jesus as God 
over all, blessed forevermore ? 

Let us attend to the facts: 

1. Before and since Christ all nations have 
believed in the existence of a God. Plutarch’s 
famous words are true for all lands and for all 
times: “You may see cities without walls, 
without laws, without coins, without writing; 
but a people without a God, without prayer, 
without religious exercises and sacrifices has no 
man seen.” 

2. Efforts to approach God by prayer and sac- 
rifices are universal, and the hope that the God 
will approach men in an incarnation is common 
to all nations. Observation of this fact justified 
Luthardt’s great generalization, “God and man 
can not remain apart from each other, can not 
maintain indifference toward each other; they 
struggle towards each other from an intrinsic 
necessity, they exist for each other; for God 
will be the God of man, and man is to be the 
man of God.’” 

3. It is not more clearly written in Serip- 
ture than in history that the universal belief of 
man is “without the shedding of blood there 
is no remission.” So deep-seated is this convic- 
tion that it has overcome the strong passion of 


‘The Fundamental Truths of Christianity,” page 131. 


Bloody Sacrifices and a Divine Sufferer 137 


ownership and led men to sacrifice hecatombs 
of birds and beasts upon altars to their gods. 
Man might be tracked through history by the 
blood from his sacrifices. He has seemed to feel 
that to appease the invisible God it was nec- 
_ essary for him to expel from living bodies the 
invisible life, and send it into the unseen world 
bruised and crying that it might plead on his 
behalf for pardon in that unearthly realm. Not 
in anger nor heartlessness, but in unutterable 
agony he has sometimes laid his hand upon 
human beings, even the children of his loins 
and the companions of his soul, that even they 
might bear his plea for mercy to God, and 
might intercede for him with groanings that 
could not be uttered. Nor did one offering 
suffice. The sacrifices of one day called for 
others the next. Human sacrifices were felt 
eventually to be inferior to the requirements 
of the case. A divine sufferer was called for. 
Mackay affirms that “the notion of a suffering 
deity was wide-spread, extending from Judea 
westward including Scythians, Asians and Ara- 
bians.” 

4. There was one nation with whom this 
idea of a divine sufferer was ever present. It 
overlay their minds beyond the limits of con- 
sciously definite thought, as a nebulous but in- 
eradicable conviction. It was central to their 


138 “The Hope of Israel” 


political system (if such they may be said to 
have had) and penetrated their national life. 
It dominated their literature, and found ex- 
pression particularly in the books of their 
prophets. In short this “lonely people with 
their lonely book” seemed to exist for the sake 
of this idea. One of their number character- 
ized it as “the hope of Israel.” (Acts xxvil. 
20.) This hope of a-coming Messiah cheered 
and sustained the nation in its periods of direst 
calamity and deepest defeats. Standing in 
the midst of the moral decay and political des- 
olation—always around when one of them ap- 
peared—the prophets of Israel comforted 
themselves and encouraged their contempora- 
ries with visions of the coming Deliverer. 
Without regard to the authorship or date 
of any of these prophecies, the Messianic hope 
is in them all, and they were in existence before 
the time of Jesus, and a Greek translation of 
them—the Septuagint—was at that time in 
common use among the Jews. These prophets 
looked up to this vision of a Messiah as to “one 
standing on a high peak reporting of the sunrise 
to men in the dark valley. . . . . They saw 
upon his countenance the glow of the dawn, and 
dazzling all about Him, the incommunicable 
splendours of a new day.’”” 

‘Van Dyke’s “Gospel for an Age of Doubt,” page 70 


—an allusion to Jesus as he appeared to his early dis- 
ciples. 


A General Expectation 139 


5. Before Jesus appeared this Messianic 
hope of Israel had gotten abroad among 
other nations, and there was a_ general 
expectation that about that time the Deliverer 
for whom the world had yearned, and for 
whom Israel in particular had hoped, would 
appear in Judea. “Suetonius (B. C. 13) made 
a collection of Sibyls which were exten- 
sively circulated, and which predicted the 
coming of a great King out of Judea, who 
should in power and glory reign over the 
whole earth. This expectation, founded on 
what Tacitus calls the ‘sacerdotal books,’ was 
so prevalent and persistent that when Cesar 
Augustus assumed the office of Pontifex Maxi- 
mus, or High Priest of Rome, he issued orders 
ealling in all these prophetic books; some 
two thousand copies thus collected were pub- 
licly burned.’” 

6. Among the Jews there was a peculiar 
state of expectancy. Holy men waited for the 
consolation of Israel (Luke ii. 25) and the com- 
mon people dreamed of one near at hand who 
should redeem Israel. (Luke xxiv. 21.) If 
a remarkable teacher appeared the official classes 
felt it necessary to inquire if he were not the 
Messiah. (John i. 19, 20.) The atmosphere 


5“The God Man,” by L. T. Townsend, D.D., page 172. 


140 A Great Preacher Appeared 


of the times was heavy with the hope that the 
Messiah was at hand. 

7. About that time a great preacher ap- 
peared and roused the Jewish people to a state 
of excitement such as they had never known. 
: He disclaimed Messiahship, and with unimag- 
inable modesty and self-renunciation said of 
Jesus of Nazareth, “He must increase, but I 
must decrease,” and encouraged his disciples 
to leave him and attach themselves to Christ. 
(John iii. 25-36.) 

Let this suffice for the history before Christ. 
If he be not God, towards whom did pre-Chris- 
tian history thus point? Was it but a mighty 
maze and all without a plan? It is not a piece 
with post-Christian history. The Messianic ex- 
pectation is now entirely disappeared from the 
Pagan world; has that bright ray perished in 
rayless gloom, or has it been lost in the dawn ? 
Bloody sacrifices have ceased among the Jews, 
and indeed wherever Christianity has gone,— 
almost now from the world. Who wrenched 
the sacrificial knife from the hands of mankind 
and sheathed it? Israel has fallen on days 
when a new prophecy of the Messiah, if the 
Messiah has not already come, is more sorely 
needed than ever before. Scattered in every 
land, without a temple and without a priest, this 
companionless people wanders and waits! Why 


A Mutilated Plan 141 


are all its prophetic voices hushed when they are 
the most sorrowfully needed ? 

What of that strangest of Israel’s prophets, 
John the Baptist? What a ghastly and unac- 
countable being is he if Jesus is not the hoped- 
for Messiah? What was his spiritual ancestry 
and how comes it that this mightiest prophet 
made no disciples? To what order of sequence 
does he belong? How shall he be placed in 
history ? 

If Jesus be not God ancient history is the 
record of a mutilated plan which the God tried, 
and abandoned as impracticable, after shedding 
the blood of millions of sacrifices, and after, 
by it, raising and disappointing the fairest hope 
of the noblest of mankind. 

The contemporaneous history of the time of 
Jesus we will now consider. 

1. Just before he comes among men, we 
find the people of the nation to which he be- 
longed, and which had been remarkably pre- © 
served through fifteen centuries before his time, ; 
beginning to scatter. They and their Scrip- 
tures and their synagogues were found in all the 
principal cities of the world. So when the 
Apostles went forth with the Gospel they found 
places of worship and assemblies of hearers 
ready for their new and startling message. 

2. The Alexandrian conquests had carried 


142 World-wide Conjunctions 


the Grecian language and philosophy through- 
out the world, and that philosophy had de 
throned the Pagan deities. Unbelief was prev- 
alent everywhere. 

3. The Roman Empire was as universal as 
the Greek language and the Greek philosophy. 
The agents of the world-wide faith had thus 
their way opened to preach to all nations, for the 
pass of a Roman citizen was everywhere ac- 
knowledged. 

4. It was a time of general peace. 

Do not these world-wide conjunctions, 
brought to pass without human intention, indeed 
without the comprehension of the human in- 
struments by whom they were produced, seem 
to be a visible preparation for the Messiah so 
long hoped for? ‘Why else do they concur in 
time when they might as well have happened 
centuries apart? Whence comes it, when hu- 
man history has been brewing in so great a 
ferment, for so many ages, all these great prepa- 
rations should just now be ready, calling for 
the King with their common voice, and saying, 
‘The fullness of time is come.’ ”’® 

Critics need not carp at the story of the Wise 
Men and the Star of Bethlehem. Here are 
conjunctions more marvelous than any that 
ever shone in the firmament. By the cradle 


‘Bushnell’s “Nature and the Supernatural,” pages 
417, 418. 


What of Modern History? 143 


of Jesus stood the majestic figures of Hebrew 
Faith, Grecian Language, Hellenistic Philoso- 
phy, and Roman Law—mightier figures than 
the Eastern Magi—and assembled around Him 
by the hand which made the world. 

What of modern history ? 

If ancient history testified to Jesus, and gasp- 
ing in death cried “Behold the Lamb,” much 
more does modern history reveal his power and 
disclose his divinity. In modern times the tri- 
umphs of Christianity have been nothing short 
of the miraculous. 

In spite of the providential preparation of 
the world for his coming, on every theory of 
human probability Jesus was foredoomed to 
failure if he were not God. This will be man- 
ifest if we consider the nature of the Gospel, 
the opposition it incurred and the human in- 
struments by which its success was achieved. 

1. The central facts of his Gospel were 
offensive to both the Jewish and Pagan 
mind. The doctrine of a crucified and risen 
Messiah was, as Paul declared, a ‘“stumbling- 
block to the Jew and foolishness to the Gentile.” 
The struggle with the Judaizers and the Gnos- 
ties concerning the person of Christ as the God- 
Man, with which the church contended until 
the Council of Chalcedon, and which has really 
continued until this day in all the forms of 
modern Unitarianism, shows how unacceptable 


144 Strong Enemies and Feeble Friends 


to the carnal mind is the idea of a crucified 
Saviour. 

2. His ethical requirements of poverty 
of spirit, purity of heart, humility, self- 
denial and cross-bearing were repugnant to an 
age which one of its most discriminating his- 
torians characterized as “corrupted and cor- 
rupting.”’ 

3. The opposition of political ambition 
and ecclesiastical jealousy rose up against 
him. They met him in His infancy with the 
slaughter of the innocents of Bethlehem on his 
account, and followed him to his tomb in the 
garden of Joseph of Arimathea. He fore- 
warned his disciples that they advanced to a 
similar fate. He sent them forth as lambs 
among wolves, charged with the superhuman 
task of converting wolves into lambs. The 
event justified his prediction. Stephen and 
James met martyrdom before the Gospel had 
created a single church beyond the limits of 
Palestine. 

4. The instruments which he employed, — 
humanly speaking, were contemptible and in- 
adequate. Ignorant and unlettered men were 
sent on a mission which would have been im- 
possible of achievement by all the philosophers 
of Greece supported by the legions of the Ca- 


sars. 


The Triumphs of Jesus 145 


And yet in three centuries they so far 
succeeded that the Emperor Constantine was 
constrained to profess obedience to the faith— 
if sincerely, a wonder; and if insincerely, then 
coerced by an imperial public opinion, and 
therefore a still greater wonder. 

The limits of this discussion do not admit of 
either a quantitative or qualitative analysis of 
the triumphs of Jesus in all the centuries since 
then. Large volumes could not contain the 
records of such an investigation. The books 
which have been produced by his influence make 
immense libraries. The songs inspired by his 
Spirit fill the earth with melody. He has 
set the cross everywhere—the cross, once so 
despised. The instrument of his shame is seen 
in all lands as the thrilling symbol of an all-con- 
quering faith. The very dates of the world do 
him reverence. The folding doors of the world’s 
history are inscribed respectively ‘Before 
Christ”? and “Anno Domini.” The ancient 
world went to sleep in his cradle and the modern 
world awaked out of his grave. | 

The testimony of Napoleon the Great, spoken 
to Count Montholon on the island of St. Helena, 
is a Just conclusion concerning the majesty and 
divinity of Jesus as revealed in history. He 
ig said to have inquired “Can you tell me 


who Jesus Christ was?” and when a nega- 
10 


146 The.Conclusion of Napoleon the Great 


tive answer was given to the question, 
he began: ‘Well then, I will tell you. 
Alexander, Czsar, Charlemagne and myself 
have founded great Empires; but upon what 
did these creations of our genius depend? Up- 
on force. Jesus alone founded His empire upon 
love, and to this very day millions would die 
for Him .... I think I understand some- 
thing of human nature; and I tell you all these 
were men, and Jamaman. None else is like 
him; Jesus Christ was more than man. I have 
inspired multitudes with such an enthusiastic 
devotion that they would have died for me 
.... but to do this it was necessary that I 
should be visibly present with the electric influ- 
ence of my looks, of my words, of my voice. 
When I saw men and spoke to them I lighted up 
the flame of self-devotion in their hearts..... 
Christ alone has succeeded in so raising the 
mind of man towards the Unseen that it be- 
comes insensible to the barriers of time and 
space. Across a chasm of eighteen hundred 
years Jesus Christ makes a demand which is 
beyond all others difficult to satisfy. He asks 
for that which a philosopher may often seek 
in vain at the hands of his friends, or a father 
of his children, or a bride of her spouse, or a 
man of his brother. He asks for the human 
heart; He will have it entirely to himself. 


Irresistible and Inevitable 147 


He demands it unconditionally; and forthwith 
his demand is granted. Wonderful! In de- 
fiance of time and space the soul of man with 
all its powers and faculties becomes an annexa- 
tion to the empire of Christ. All who sin- 
cerely believe in him experience that remark- 
able supernatural love towards him. This 
phenomenon is unaccountable; it is altogether 
beyond the scope of man’s creative powers. 
Time, the great destroyer, is powerless to ex- 
tinguish this sacred flame; time can neither 
exhaust its strength nor put a limit to its range. 
This is it which strikes me most; I have often 
thought of it. This it is which proves to me 
quite convincingly the Divinity of Jesus 
Christ.” 

The conclusion is irresistible and inevitable. 
The Jesus of the Gospels is the God of provi- 
dence. ‘We turn ourselves to the courses and 
the grand events of human history, all that we 
include in the providential history of the world 
—the wars, diplomacies, emigrations, revolu- 
tions, discoveries and scientific developments 
of the world—and we are immediately met by 
some wonderful consent or understanding be- 
tween Christianity and the providential courses 
of things. Christianity is in form the Super- 
natural kingdom and working of God in the 
earth. It begins with a supernatural advent 


148 Jean Paul Richter’s Words 


of divinity and closes with a supernatural exit 
of divinity; and the divine visitant thus en- 
tered into the world, and going out from it, is 
himself a divine miracle in his own person; 
his works are miracles and _ his doctrine 
quite as truly, and the whole transaction taken 
as a movement on the world, or in it, not of it, 
supposes in fact a new and superior kind of 
administration, instituted by God himself.” 

The government of the world is evidently 
with Jesus. “He being,” as Jean Paul Richter 
beautifully says, “the holiest among the mighty 
and the mightiest among the holy, has lifted 
with his pierced hand empires off their hinges, 
has turned the stream of centuries out of its 
channel and still governs the ages.” 

The Jesus of the Evangelists is the God of 
the world’s history. 


TBushnell’s “Nature and the Supernatural,” page 
412. 


A ge 


Xx 


WHEN GOD WAS AMONG MEN DID 
HE APPROVE ANY SACRED BOOKS? 
THE WITNESS OF JESUS TO THE 
OLD TESTAMENT 


“Search the Scriptures; for in them ye think ye 
have eternal life: and they are they which testify of 
me.”’—Jesus. 


“Let, then, the Prince of Life, the Light of the 
world, reckon all of us as his scholars. What he 
believed let us receive. What he respected let us re- 
vere. Let us press to our sickly hearts that word to 
which he submitted his Saviour heart, and all the 
thoughts of his holy humanity, and to it let us sub- 
ject all the thoughts of our fallen humanity.”—Gaus- 
sen. 


“There is not the least doubt that the Apostles, 
and, as a rule, the Christians of their time, held the 
words of Scripture to be not the words of men but 
the words of God.”’—Reuss, 


x 


Wuen Gop Was Amona Men Dip He Approve 
ANY SacrED Booxs? Tur WITNEss OF 
JESUS TO THE OLD TESTAMENT. 


“Gop owes it to mankind not to lead them 
into error,” says Pascal. 

We have considered the evidences that estab- 
lish that Jesus was a divine person. His un- 
earthly character and his indisputable resurrec- 
tion from the dead utterly forbid his classifica- 
tion with men. The existence of the church 
from a few months after the crucifixion until 
this day, and the persistence of Christianity 
contrary to every human probability and even 
possibility, are living miracles of ever-increas- 
ing wonder, which quite apart from the personal 
testimony of Apostles long since disappeared 
from the earth are convincing evidences that 
he rose from the dead and is therefore God over 
all. The witness of history from the beginning 
of the world shows him to be nothing less than 
the Majestic Personality who has always over- 
shadowed and directed the movement of man- 
kind, moulding its forces, however widely sep- 
arated in time and space, into one harmonious 

151 


152 Leading Mankind Into Error 


whole, and informing it with a moral purpose 
which runs through the ages. 

It is incredible that such an One should 
“lead mankind into error.” But if the Hebrew 
Scriptures be not such a revelation as mankind 
may safely follow without danger of being mis- 
guided, he has led the church, which was found- 
ed on the belief that he was God victorfous over 
death and the grave, and he has led the Apos- 
tles who founded it, into the gravest of errors 
—an error already suspected by some men and 
which must inevitably in process of time become 
known by all men to the undoing of the church, 
and the overthrow of Christianity, if not, in- 
deed, to the extirpation of faith from the earth. 

When He was among men we find him in no- 
wise slow to expose false teaching concerning 
religious truth, even though such teaching could 
be traced ‘‘to them of old time,” and claim the 
authority of antiquity for itself. (Matthew 
v. 21-48.) He did not hesitate to revise the 
- regulations of Moses on occasion, though in 
doing so he incurred the wrath of his contem- 
poraries who reverenced Moses. (Mark x. 2-9.) 
At another time he declared in tones of burning 
indignation of the world’s false guides, “All 
that ever came before me are thieves and rob- 
bers.” (John x. 8.) 

But he who declared himself to be “the Way, 


A Constant and Unbroken Testimony 153 


the Truth and the Life” (John xiv. 6), and 
who on his trial before Pontius Pilate said “to 
this end was I born, and for this cause came I 
into the world, that I should bear witness unto 
the truth,” gave to the Hebrew Scriptures, 
known as the “Old Testament,” a constant and 
unbroken testimony of endorsement throughout 
his entire earthly ministry. In the course of 
his public teaching he “either cites or refers to 
passages in the Old Testament Scriptures prob- 
ably more than four hundred times.’” When 
it is remembered that all but one (Acts xx. 35) 
of his recorded utterances are contained in 
four brief pamphlets called the Gospels, such 
a great number of instances in which he gave 
outright endorsement, or indirect approval, to 
the Old Testament Scriptures will appear the 
more remarkable and conclusive. And the fact 
becomes still more significant, when it is shown 
that not even once does he make a citation from 
what is known as “the Apocrypha” —most 
probably “not even a reference to it or an echo 
from its words.”” Nor is the force of this as- 
tounding fact diminished by the frank admis- 
sion that in many instances the exact words, as 
quoted by Him, are not found in any text of 
which we have knowledge. The freedom of 


*Ellicott’s “Christus Comprobator,” page 91. 
*Tbid., page 122. 


154 In the Temptation 


cral utterance, and the application of truths to 
the peculiarities of special occasions may go far 
to explain this verbal variation. “Tt may even 
be true, as asserted by a very competent writer, 
that the text of the Hebrew Scriptures im cur- 
rent use in our Lord’s days was not the same in 
all respects as that which we now have—still 
the deviations when analyzed are of a nature 
that certainly does not invalidate the general 
truth of the impression,” that Jesus authenti- 
cated the Old Testament as being “Oracles of 
God.” 

The force of the argument will be enhanced 
by particular references: 

Immediately after his introduction to the 
Jewish nation by the public testimony to him, 
and identification of Him, by John the Baptist, 
he went into the wilderness to a temptation, so 
utterly different from all human conceptions of 
temptation, that the reality of the experience 1s 
guaranteed by the impossibility that any man of 
any age could have invented the story, and least 
of all that it could have been invented by the 
Evangelists. Since it was an experience in 
solitude to which he retired unattended by 
friend or kinsman, the account of it by the 
Evangelists must have been derived from Him. 
There, alone “with the wild beasts” (Mark 
i. 18), we are told he was approached with sug- 


®Bllicott’s Christus Comprobator,” pages 121, 122. 


Se ee 


At Nazareth 155 


gestions to evil, every one of which he repelled 
by appeals to the Scriptures, quoting thrice 
from the book of Deuteronomy—a book which, 
we remark in passing, has been the subject of 
much speculation by the rationalizing critics of 
the Old Testament. 

Shortly after the Temptation he returned to 
Nazareth, “where he had been brought up; and 
as his custom was, he went into the synagogue 
on the Sabbath day, and stood up for to read. 
And there was delivered unto him the book of 
the prophet Esaias (Isaiah). And when he 
had opened the book, he found the place where 
it was written, The Spirit of the Lord is upon 
me, because he hath anointed me to preach the 
Gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the 
broken hearted, to preach deliverance to the 
captives, and recovering of sight to the. blind, 
to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach 
the acceptable year of the Lord..... And he 
began to say unto them, This day is this Script- 
ure fulfilled in your ears.” (Luke iv. 16-21.) 
In the progress of the discourse which followed 
he alluded to the history and miracles of Elijah 
and Elisha, as set forth in 1 Kings xvii. 9 and 
2 Kings v. 14. Behold how he takes his text 
from that prophet, and from that part of his 
prophecy (Isaiah lxi. 1) at which the destruc- 
tive critics have most stumbled, and draws his 


156 In “the Sermon on the Mount” 


proof texts from those narratives which have 
suffered most at the hands of the modern doc- 
tors—the histories upon which they have spent 
all their critical skill and from which they have 
risen leaving them nothing bettered but rather 
the worse for all their treatment. 

The Sermon in the Synagogue at Nazareth 
gave great offense. The people who heard him 
were “filled with wrath and rose up and thrust 
him out of the city.” (Luke iv. 28, 29.) 
Thenceforth in so far as it can be said that he 
had a home, it was at Capernaum. That city 
became the centre of his evangelistic tours in 
Palestine, and presently on a hill in the neigh- 
borhood of it, the Evangelist Matthew shows 
him preaching what has been called “The Ser- 
mon on the Mount”—a discourse which both 
Christians and unbelievers unite with one voice 
in reckoning to be the noblest utterance which 
ever fell upon the ears of man, to be spoken of 
forever along with the Ten Commandments of 
Sinai. He did not proceed far into it until he 
felt moved to repudiate or revise the teachings 
of “them of old time.” But that no hearer 
might imagine he was expressing dissent from 
the Hebrew Scriptures he enters upon that part 
of the discussion with these words: ‘Think 
not that I am come to destroy the law, or the 
prophets ; I am not come to destroy but to fulfill. 


In Meeting His Adversaries 157 


For verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth 
pass one jot or one tittle shall in nowise pass 
from the law till all be fulfilled.” The force 
of these words is, as may be seen in the word, 
“verily”—a word he never uses except when he 
seeks to enforce with solemn emphasis some 
overwhelming truth, as for example when he 
instructs Nicodemus concerning the New Birth. 
It is to be remarked furthermore that near the 
close of his ministry he uses the same form of 
speech in predicting the enduring life of his 
own words, saying, “Heaven and earth shall 
pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” 

In meeting his opponents in public contro- 
versy, when of all occasions he must of neces- 
sity have been most cautious and convincing, he 
appealed with confidence to the Old Testament 
Scriptures, as to a decisive and undebatable 
standard of truth. 

The Sadducees seeking to overthrow the doc- 
trine of the resurrection approached him with 
the case of a woman successively the wife of 
seven brothers, and last of all dying herself. 
They inquired “In the resurrection whose wife 
shall she be of the seven?” He refuted the 
inference which they sought to draw from the 
ease by the declaration, “Ye do err, not know- 
ing the Scriptures nor the power of God.” Rest- 
ing his argument on a single word in an histor- 


158 Confounding the Sadducees 


ical passage in the book of Exodus, he over- 
whelms his adversaries with the question, “But 
as touching the resurrection of the dead, have 
ye not read that which was spoken unto you by 
God saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the 
God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is 
not the God of the dead, but of the living.” 
(Matthew xxii. 23-33.) The Evangelist adds not 
that the Sadducees demurred to the competency 
of the authority invoked by Him, but adds “And 
when the multitude heard this they were as- 
tonished at his doctrine.” 

Here then we have one instance at least in 
‘which Jesus solemnly affirms God has spoken 
unto men, and though the word had been origi- 
nally spoken unto Moses (compare Mark X11. 
16, with the accounts as given by Matthew and 
Luke), and transmitted by writing to the Sad- 
ducees, with all the chances incident to copying 
and preserving the words through the centuries, 
when it reached them in his day he felt that he 
might justly describe, it as “that which was 
spoken unto you by God.” (Matthew XXl. 
31.) 

On the same occasion “One of the Scribes 
came and having heard them reasoning together, 
and perceiving that he had answered them well, 
asked him, which is the first commandment of 
all?’ (Mark xii. 28.) Jesus answers him with 


Overwhelming Scribes and Pharisees 159 


a quotation from Deuteronomy (vi. 4, 5) : “Hear 
O Israel; the Lord our God is one Lord: And 
thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy 
heart, and with all thy mind, and with all thy 
strength.” He adds also a citation from Levit- 
icus (xix. 18): “Thou shalt love thy neighbor 
as thyself.” 

At the same time “While the Pharisees,” 
says St. Matthew, “were gathered together, Je- 
sus asked them, Saying, What think ye of 
Christ @ whose son is he? They say unto him, 
The Son of David. He saith unto them, How 
then doth David in Spirit call him Lord, saying, 
The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my 
right hand, till I make thine enemies my foot- 
stool? If David then call him Lord, how is he 
his Son?” (Matthew xxii. 41-46.) The Evan- 
gelist remarks upon the incident “And no man 
was able to answer him a word, neither durst 
any man from that day forth ask him any more 
questions.” 

Commenting upon this remark of the Evan- 
gelist the devout Doctor Gaussen of Geneva 
energetically demands to know: ‘How happens 
it, that among those Pharisees none was found 
to say in reply, ‘What! do you mean to insist on 
a single word, and still more on a term borrowed 
from a poesy, eminently lyrical, where the royal 
Psalmist might, without material consequence, 


160 Dr. Gaussen and Bishop Ellicott 


have employed too lively a construction, high- 
flown expressions, and words which doubtless, 
he had not theologically pondered before put- 
ting them into his verses? Would you follow 
such a mode of minutely interpreting each ex- 
pression as is at once fanatical and servile? 
Would you worship the letter of the Scriptures 
to such an extreme? Would you build a whole 
doctrine upon a word?” Speaking more 
judicially concerning this use of Psalm CX. by 
Jesus, Bishop Ellicott says: “What we may de- 
duce from this particular passage is this: 
First, that the Psalm was written by David, and 
that thus this particular superscription is right, 
Secondly, that David was here writing by direct 
inspiration of the Holy Ghost. Thirdly, that 
the reference to the Messiah is so distinct, that 
David may be regarded as consciously speaking 
of Him.” 

The enforeed silence of the adversaries of 
Jesus—no man among them “from that day 
forth durst ask him any more questions” (Mat- 
thew xxii.46; Luke xx. 40)—is conclusive proof 
that the divine authority of the Jewish Scrip- 
tures was universally acknowledged when he 
was living in Palestine, and that far from dis- 


‘Gaussen’s “Theopneustia,” page 99. . 
5“Christus Comprobator,” page 174. 


The Period of “the Forty Days” 161 


senting from this view of their character he 
constantly appealed to it and relied upon it. 
The complete triumph of his method—a victory 
carefully noted by both Matthew and Luke— 
the latter using the strong words “after that 
they durst not ask him anything”—is full of 
far-reaching significance. May we not ask if 
that which was the end of controversy then ought 
not to be so now? 

Passing over the multitude of other similar 
instances of Christ’s appealing to and approving 
the Old Testament, the consideration of this 
branch of our investigation may close with two 
incidents which belong to the period of the mem- 
orable forty days between the Resurrection 
and the Ascension. That period seems to have 
been spent by him in confirming the faith of 
his followers with many “infallible proofs” 
(Acts i. 3) of his resurrection, and in giving 
commandments concerning the spread of his 
gospel and the establishing of his church in the 
world “unto the Apostles whom he had chosen.” 

On one of these days—the third after the 
Crucifixion and the first after the Resurrection 
-—two of his followers were on the way to a vil- 
lage called Emmaus, “which was from Jerusa- 
lem about threescore furlongs.” They were 
“sad” and perplexed “communing and reason- 
ing” foschage about the strange events of the 


162 On the Way to Emmaus 


hour when “Jesus himself drew near and went 
with them. But their eyes were holden that 
they should not know him.” Inquiring the cause 
of their sadness and perplexity, he elicited from 
them the story of how “Jesus of Nazareth, a 
prophet, mighty in deed and word before God 
and all the people,” had been condemned to 
death and crucified though they had trusted 
that he might have been the Messiah who should 
have redeemed their nation. They told him 
also of the Resurrection which had been report- 
ed by certain women of their company, of the 
vision of angels and of the report of certain 
men who had gone to the sepulchre and found 
it even as the women had said, but who had 
failed to see their Risen Lord. ‘Then he said 
unto them, O fools, and slow of heart to believe 
all that the prophets have spoken: Ought not 
Christ to have suffered these things and to 
enter his glory? And beginning at Moses and 
all the prophets he expounded unto them in all 
the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” 
(Luke xxiv. 13-27.) 

On a later occasion while eating a simple 
meal with certain of his followers, whom he de- 
clared should become witnesses unto him among 
all nations beginning at Jerusalem, “he said 
unto them, These are the words which I spake 
unto you, while I was yet with you, that all 


The Belief of the Apostles 163 


things must be fulfilled, which were written in 
the law of Moses, and in the prophets and in 
the psalms concerning me. Then opened he 
their understanding that they might understand 
the Scriptures.” (Luke xxiv. 44-45.) It will 
be observed that with particularity of descrip- 
tion he identifies and approves the Hebrew 
Canon — “Moses,” “the Prophets,” ‘the 
Psalms”—they were all of it. 

Is there room left for doubt that if Jesus did 
not believe the Old Testament to be a revelation 
from God he purposely led his foes, his fol- 
lowers, and all the people who heard him into 
error? If there still be room for doubt, let us 
see if we can find what the wisest among them 
did actually believe and teach on the subject 
subsequently. That will show that, if Jesus 
did not deceive them, he at least left them vic- 
tims—life-long victims—of the popular delu- 
sion of their day concerning the authority of 
the Scriptures. 

The preacher of the Pentecost, Simon son of 
Jonas (whose noble confession at Caesarea Phi- 
lippi, a few weeks before the Crucifixion, evoked 
the warm eulogy of his Master) on the memora- 
ble occasion when three thousand souls in the 
cityof Jerusalem turned abruptly from Judaism 
to Christianity, quoted approvingly in the prog- 
ress of his wonder-wor’:ing discourse from a 


164 Peter's Sermon at the Pentecost 


prophecy of Joel and two of the Psalms of Da- 
vid, together with possible, but not so unmis- 
takable, allusions to the prophecies of Isaiah, 
Ezekiel and Zechariah. (Acts ii. 16.) It is 
noticeable that one of the Psalms is that with 
which Jesus ended the controversy with the 
Pharisees. He had evidently learned from his 
Master the true view of the 110th Psalm. 

A short time thereafter Peter, speaking to a 
concourse of people, who had run together in 
the porch of the temple which was called “Sol- 
omon’s,” around himself and John and a cripple 
whom they had healed, declared unto them that 
the facts concerning the crucifixion of Jesus 
were “of those things which God before had 
shewed by the mouth of all his prophets, that 
Christ should suffer.” (Acts iii. 18.) In the 
same address he quoted from Deuteronomy 
(which from his Lord he had learned to refer to 
as being “what Moses said”) a prediction of the 
Messiah, and adds “Yea, and all the prophets 
from Samuel, and those that follow after, as 
many as have spoken, have likewise foretold of 
these days.” (Acts iil. 24.) Here is surely 
an all-inclusive declaration—“all the prophets 
from Samuel, as many as have spoken.” The 
rising up of Samuel here in Peter’s discourse is 
calculated to affect the destructive critics as 
the prophet’s reappearance in the cave of Endor 


The Discourse of Stephen 165 


affected the apostate King Saul, from whom 
“God had departed,” who when Samuel spoke 
to him, fell “straightway all along the earth 
(i. e., full length) and was sore afraid, and 
there was no strength in him.” (1 Samuel 
xxviii. 20.) 

Stephen, the first martyr, in his defense be- 
fore the men who stoned him to death, reviews 
with perfect confidence upon his own part, and 
without contradiction by his accusers, the whole 
Israelitish history as recorded in the Old Tes- 
tament, and declares the story of the nation 
was one of disobedience to their inspired proph- 
ets, which he denounces as “resistance to the 
Holy Ghost.” (Acts vii. 51.) They were unable 
to overcome his appeal to their own Scriptures, 
and being powerless to silence him “with force 
of argument they resorted to the argument of 
force,” casting him out of the city and stoning 
him till he died. And Saul of Tarsus, a man 
mighty in the Scriptures, was there and “was 
consenting unto his death.” 

This Saul was subsequently converted, and 
became an Apostle, and one “not a whit behind 
the chiefest.”” (2 Corinthians xi. 5.) Huis change 
of sides in the mighty struggle which sprang up 
in Palestine about the resurrection of Jesus, a 
short time after the crucifixion, cost him much. 
He himself is authority for the statement that 


166 eS of T. wrsus 


it cost him “the loss of all things.” But in pass- 
ing from Judaism to Christianity there was one 
thing he never dreamed of leaving behind— 
the Jewish Scriptures. On the contrary he 
clung to them more tenaciously and tenderly 
than ever before. When he was a prisoner at 
Rome, incarcerated with no hope of ever being | 
free again—a prisoner for the hope of Israel, 
bound with a chain, and still more firmly bound 
to Christ (Acts xxviii. 20)—his heart turned 
hungrily towards the precious parchments 
which he hurriedly left with his friend Carpus 
at Troas on the day of his second arrest. With 
these he wished to spend the dreary days and the 
the drearier nights of his waiting in the Roman 
dungeon, and so he wrote Timothy to send 
them. His letter reminds one of that touching 
letter of William Tyndale, a martyr also for 
the Bible, written from the damp prison of 
Vilvoorde. This greatest of the translators of 
the English Bible writes a friend, as winter 
approaches, requesting that his friend will 
beg the Commissary to send “a warmer cap,” 
“a warmer cloak,” ‘‘a woolen shirt’ and “some 
cloth to patch his leggings,” and adds: “But 
most of all I entreat and implore your kind- 
ness to do your best with the Commissary to be 
so good as to send me my Hebrew Bible, gram- 
mar, and vocabulary, that I may spend my 


Paul to His Son Timothy 167 


time in that pursuit.”’ This noble martyr, 
waiting for the ascension he accomplished from 
Antwerp, did not in the sixteenth century pore 
more devoutly and believingly over his He- 
brew Bible, in the cold cells of Vilvoorde, than 
did Paul over the Old Testament Scriptures 
while in the first century he looked from a 
Roman dungeon for the coming of his Lord, 
bringing his confessor’s crown. Writing 
with his manacled hand to Timothy, his dear 
son in the Gospel, he thus exhorts him: “But 
continue thou in the things which thou hast 
learned and hast been assured of, knowing of 
whom thou hast learned them, and that from a 
child thou hast known the Holy Scriptures, 
which are able to make thee wise unto salva- 
tion through faith which is in Christ Jesus. 
All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, 
and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for 
correction, for instruction in righteousness; 
that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly 
furnished unto all good works. (2 Timothy, 
ili. 14-17.) 

Clearly the ancient Jews did not hold more 
reverently the Hebrew Scriptures than did the 
Apostles of Jesus and the Primitive Church. 
And if in this matter they did cling to the 


- ®Quoted by Archdeacon Farrar in ‘’The Messages of 
the Books,” page 392. 


168 The Church and the Critics 


beggarly elements of an obstinate Judaism, and 
did thus fall into grievous error, they could 
plead in extenuation of their folly the defer- 
ence which their Master paid to the Old Tes- 
tament. He had eaten those sour grapes and 
therefore their teeth were set on edge. 

There remains yet one other proof that we 
have not mistaken the attitude of Jesus to the 
sacred books of the Jews—a striking and pe- 
culiar proof. Reference is intended to the tes- 
timony of some of the modern historical critics 
-—sometimes called “the higher critics.” They 
betray in their writings the consciousness that 
their theories are in conflict with the teachings 
of Jesus, and they adopt a clumsy, if not blas- 
phemous, device to escape the consequent em- 
barrassment of their position. Finding them- 
selves in antagonism to the words of Jesus, they 
take an appeal from his authority, by pleading 
what one has called his “intellectual fallibili- 
ty” as a part of that limitation of his human- 
ity which is technically known as his Kenosis. 
The Roman soldiers refused to divide his seam- 
less coat, but these analysts of the incarnation, 
to meet the exigencies of an untenable hypothe- 
sis, put asunder his divine and human natures, 
that his divinity may escape responsibility for 
his uncritical humanity, which echoes the cur- 
rent opinion of his superstitious age, instead of 


Nescience Deeper than Silence 169 


uttering the enduring truth of the everlasting 
God. They devise a theory of Messianic humil- 
iation which imposes upon Jesus a limitation 
of knowledge but no restraint of utterance— 
his nescience is deeper than his silence. It is 
evident that a self-emptying of this sort does 
not result in a God-man but ends in a false 
man. <A kenosis which depresses the intellect 
beneath the level of capacity to know if the He- 
brew Scriptures were a revelation from God, 
but leaves the powers of speech free to errone- 
ously declare them to be such a revelation, is 
not the Kenosis of the Evangelists and St. 
Paul. It brings before us a theological cen- 
taur, painfully conceived and monstrously de- 
livered by a distressed criticism, and not the 
babe of Bethlehem, born of the Virgin Mary. 
And yet, such is the image upon which our 
rationalizing Magi bestow their treasures and 
pour out their frankincense. Kuenen says: 
“With regard to the revered Master must the 
right of criticism be maintained.” Dr. Craw- 
ford Howell Toy says: ‘As an individual man, 
He had of necessity a definite, restricted intel- 
lectual outfit and outlook, and these could be 
only those of his day and generation. As a 
teacher of spiritual truth sent from God and 


7“Prophets and Prophecy in Israel,” page 547, quoted 
by Bishop Ellicott in “Christus Comprobator,” page 97. 


170 Neologists Vivisecting the Incarnation 


full of God, He is universal; as a logician and 
critic, He belongs to his time.’* Rothe de- 
clares: ‘The Redeemer never claimed to be an 
infallible or even a generally precise interpreter 
of the Old Testament. Indeed, he could not 
have made this claim; for interpretation is es- 
sentially a scientific function, and one condi- 
tioned by the existence of scientific means, 
which, in relation to the Old Testament, were 
only imperfectly at the command of Jesus, as 
well as of his contemporaries.”” The same 
trend is visible in the chapter by Canon Gore 
on Inspiration in the well-known book, enti- 
tled “Lux Mundi.’”” 

These neologists from analyzing the Scrip- 
tures have fallen to analyzing the Messiah of 
the Scriptures. Denying the supernatural 
prescience and divine inspiration of the He- 
brew prophets, they have come at last to claim 
for themselves the right to vivisect the Incarna- 
tion, and to minutely determine the functions of 
the severed parts of the hypostatic union. They 
have extended the province of their own critical 
powers to the reduction of the area of 
the Master’s knowledge. They invite us to 
join with them in worshiping a Messiah of 


®“Quotations in the New Testament,” pages 28, 29. 

®Quoted in Ladd’s “Doctrine of Sacred Scriptures,” 
page 28. 

20<T ux Mundi,” page 301. 


“The Words Thou Gavest Me’ iG! 


their own invention—a sort of Siamese 
Twins, the divine person of the couple being as 
dumb as the Sphinx, and the human member 
being as garrulous and misleading as the am- 
biguous Oracle of Delphi. They would have 
it that this figment of their own fabrication is 
the God-man of the Evangelists, and that while 
on the earth he knew what he was being about, 
but did not know what he was talking 
about. To dislodge Moses and the prophets 
from the Mount of Inspiration, they talk with 
less reason than did the dazed disciple when he 
sought to detain the great Law-giver and Eh- 
jah on the Mount of Transfiguration. 

‘From all such vain conceits and empty spec- 
ulations, common sense, as well as faith, turns 
away to the plain but profound words of Jesus 
in his intercessory prayer for his early disci- 
ples, and the future church, on the night be- 
fore the crucifixion: ‘Now they have known 
that all things whatsoever thou hast given me 
are of thee, for I have given unto them the 
words which thou gavest me, and they have 
received them, and have known surely that I 
came out from thee, and they have believed 
that thou didst send me.” Are we at liberty to 
limit this claim of Jesus that he gave to his fol- 
lowers the words which the Father gave to 
him, so that it shall not cover what he said to 


172 The Goal of the Critics 


them concerning the Old Testament, but shall 
include only what he taught them on_ his 
own authority alone? Shall this limitation be 
placed on the instruction given to the Apostles 
just before the Ascension, when they were 
, about to go forth as his “witnesses” among all 
nations, and when in order to fit them for their 
mighty task, “he opened their understanding 
that they might understand the Scriptures?” 
Was his intellect dark and fettered while he 
enlightened and liberated their minds? If so, 
his stature is not only reduced below that of 
the Son of God; it falls below the height of 
even an inspired man. The logic of this sort 
of speculation at the first step makes the God- 
man less than an inspired man; at the second, 
it makes him less than a wise man—a mistaken 
man; and at the last, it must declare him less 
than a true man—an impostor. And so it must 
in the end reach the conclusion that the purest 
and brightest light that ever shone on men was 
darkness. 

What then is left? The light of the He 
brew Scriptures has been quenched, and Jesus, 
the Light of the World, has gone out! The 
critics themselves could not endure such dark- 
ness, for there would presently be no universi- 
ties to support them, no libraries for them to 
delve in, no manuscripts to compare, and no lis- 


‘ 


Genuine “Oracles of God” 173 


teners or readers to receive the results of their 
research. Let the belief gain general preva- 
lence that the Hebrew Scriptures are without 
authority and that Jesus is a Teacher of a 
limited reliability, let distrust of these great 
sources of Truth, whence the noblest minds 
and the loftiest civilizations have drawn their 
inspiration, become wide-spread, andthenumber 
of men left who will regard the pursuit of truth 
as being worth the effort will be few indeed. As 
has been eloquently said, “Religion will not de- 
part from this world alone. When you compose 
her form in death, prepare tears for other ob- 
jects of love, many and dear. Art, literature, 
culture and religion have taken an oath to die 
and be buried as they have lived, locked in each 
other’s arms.” ** 

Jesus, who came to witness to the Truth, is 
a true witness. He was not deceived, nor did 
he lead his followers and mankind into error. 
The Old Testament Scriptures are the “Oracles 
of God.” (Romans ili. 2.) Much advantage . 
every way had the Hebrew nation to whom 
they “were committed.” Far greater the ad- 
vantage of the Christian commonwealth—the 
Church of God—who has inherited them with 
the added blessing of Him who having fulfilled 


1From the Inaugural Address of President E. B. 
Andrews at Denison University, Ohio, Dec. 21, 1875. 


174 He Authenticates and Interprets 


them, has opened the understanding of his fol- 
lowers that they may behold wondrous things 
out of these sacred pages. 

He authenticates and interprets them, giving 
them an authority they could never have had 
without Him. He is higher than the highest of 
the critics and truer than the truest. He is 
Christus Auctor. The earth may melt with fer- 
vent heat and the heavens pass away with a 
great noise, but not one jot or one tittle of the 
Old Testament shall pass away till all be ful- 
filled. 


XI 


. WHEN GOD WAS AMONG MEN DID HE 
PROVIDE FOR SACRED BOOKS, AD- 
DITIONAL TO THE OLD TESTAMENT”? 
WHAT AUTHORITY DOES THE NEW 
TESTAMENT DERIVE FROM JESUS? 


“But these ate written that ye might believe that 
Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that be- 
lieving ye might have life through his name.”—Sz. 
John. 


“The New Testament lies concealed in the Old, and 
the Old stands revealed in the New.”—St. Augustine. 


“The question as to the value to be attached to the 
collection contained in the Canon is, and remains 
a purely historical question; the church through the 
medium of which we received it, exists for us, not as 
an infallible authority, but as a venerable witness to 
the truth.”—Van Oosterzee. 


“The principle on which the Canon of the New 
Testament is determined is equally simple. Those 
books, and those only, which can be proved to have 
been written by the Apostles, or to have received 
their sanction are to be recognized as of divine au- 
thority.”—Dr. Charles Hodge. 


DG 
Wuen Gop Was Amone Men Dip He Pro- 


vipE For Sacrep Booxs, ADDITIONAL TO 
THE Otp TESTAMENT? Wuat AUTHORITY 
Dors tue New Testament Derive From 
JESUS ? 


Jusus stands historically between the sacred 
books of the Jews and the books additional 
thereto which are held sacred by the Christian 
church. He looks backward to the Old Testa- 
ment, a canon completed before he came, com- 
posed of books of which the Jewish historian 
Josephus says “all Jews are instinctively led 
from their birth to regard as the decrees of 
God, and to abide by them, and if need he, 
gladly to die for them”—and gives it his en- 
dorsement. If other sacred books are to be 
added to these after the period of his appear- 
ance among men, He must look forward and 
make provision for them. It is not compati- | 
ble with the ends of revelation, nor agreeable 
with that method of revelation so clearly visi- 
ble in the Old Testament, that He should with 
his own hand make a sacred book. Such a 
book could not inspire worshipful faith in a 
free agent like man, but must inevitably result 

12 177 


178 The Scriptures of the Incarnation 


in defeating the very object of a divine revela- 
tion, by leading not to adoration of God, but 
to the worship of itself. If Jesus had made a 
book the earth would not now be filled with 
Christianity, but would be overrun with bibli- 
olatry. 

On the other hand, it is incredible that such 
a manifestation of God as is found in the 
earthly history of the Incarnate One should 
not be followed by Scriptures written by some- 
body. As has been remarked with great force 
by the Rev. Principal John Cairns, “It would 
be quite anomalous to have divinely provided 
records of Old Testament revelation vouched 
for by the Saviour, while the last, and in many 
respects greatest, stage of revelation, remained 
without supply or guarantee. This is not a 
mere a priori deduction. The strongest evi- 
dence of the fact would be needed to show that 
for some mysterious reason, the analogy did not 
hold. Hence the church will never believe 
that documents which seem to meet this want 
did not mean to do so, or that the New Testa- 
ment Scriptures were less carefully produced 
and less minutely superintended than that 
which our Lord treated with such unquestion- 
ing submission.” 

If one may be permitted so to speak, the al- 


*In “Inspiration: A Clerical Symposium,” page 60. 


Inspired Writings, or Apocrypha 179 


ternative before Jesus was not: no book or 
the New Testament, but the real choice was be- 
tween the New Testament and a_ boundless 
and baneful Apocrypha. It was impossible 
that his coming in the age of Tiberius should 
not set many writers to work, and unless a 
true account and a reliable exposition of his 
life and doctrine were provided for, nothing 
could be more certain than that his marvelous 
career would give rise to endless histories, more 
or less superstitious, and would eventually en- 
gender a body of fables devoid even of the virtue 
of being cunningly devised. Witness the apoc- 
ryphal gospels of the post-apostolic age. Wit- 
ness the case of Lycurgus, whose biography 
Plutarch thus begins: “Of Lycurgus, the law- 
giver, we have nothing to relate that is certain 
and uncontroverted. For there are different ac- 
counts of his birth, his travels, his death and es- 
pecially of the laws and form of government he 
established. But least of all are the times 
agreed upon in which this great man lived.” If 
such was the case with Lycurgus, who before 
Plutarch could not have lived much more than a 
thousand years, what would have been the re- 
sults to us who live at the opening of the twen- 
tieth century, if no New Testament had been 

?Edition, Applegate & Co., Cincinnati, 1855, page 46. 


180 Promises and Commands 


written? The inevitable result must have been 
destructive of what Jesus came to accomplish. 
Accordingly we find Him promising to his 
immediate Apostles, who “companied with 
Him all the time He went in and out 
among them” (Acts i. 21), special guid- 
ance of inspiration during all the period 
of their unique ministry, when, as “wit- 
nesses,” who should have, and who could have, 
no successors, they went forth to spread his 
doctrines and found his church. One can not 
imagine how they could, without such aid, ac- 
complish the mission to which he sent them. 
He had said to them, after declaring that all 
power had been given unto him in heaven and 
earth, “Go ye therefore and teach all nations, 
teaching them to observe all things whatsoever 
IT have commanded you.” How could they be 
expected to do it unless he had added, “Lo, I 
am with you always, even unto the ends of the 
world”? How could they even remember the 
“all things” which he had commanded unless 
some such mentor were provided, as is indi- 
cated in the promise: ‘These things have I 
spoken unto you, being yet present with you. 
But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, 
whom the Father will send in my name, he 
shall teach you all things and bring all things 
to your remembrance whatsoever I have said 


Dr. Gaussen’s Argument 181 


unto you”? Again, he said unto them, “Ye 
shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, 
and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto 
the uttermost part of the earth.” How could 
this commandment be obeyed to any real or val- 
uable purpose, unless in some form their words 
could be projected into regions and times into 
which in person they could never enter? For 
so great a task some inspired provision of super- 
natural aid must be forthcoming, or they must 
have failed. 

Gaussen puts the matter forcibly when he 
says: “They were the immediate envoys 
(arooré\x) of the Son of God; they went 
to all nations; they had the assurance that 
their Master would be present with the testi- 
mony they were to bear to Him in the Holy 
Scriptures. Did they require, then, less in- 
spiration for their going to the ends of the 
earth, and to make disciples of all nations, than 
the prophets required for going to Israel and 
teaching that one people, the Jews? Had they 
not to promulgate all the doctrines, all the or- 
dinances, all the mysteries of the Kingdom of 
God? Had they not to bear ‘the keys of the 
Kingdom of Heaven’ in such sort, that what- 
soever they should bind or loose on earth should 
be bound or loosed in heaven? .... Had 
they not to report his inimitable words? Had 


189 Needs as Ambassadors of God 


they not to perform on earth the miraculous, 
intransmissible functions of his representatives 
and of his ambassadors, as if it had been Christ 
that spoke by them? (2 Corinthians v. 20.) 
Were they not called to such a glory, ‘that in 
the great final regeneration, when the Son of 
man shall sit in the throne of his glory, they 
also should sit upon twelve thrones, judging the 
twelve tribes of Israel? (Matthew xix. 28.) 
If, then, prophetic inspiration were necessary 
for the former men of God, in order to show 
the Messiah under the shadows, was it not 
much more necessary for them, in order to their 
bringing him out into the light, and to their evi- 
dently setting him forth as crucified amongst 
us (Galatians ili. 1) in such manner that he 
that despiseth them despiseth him, and he that 
heareth them heareth him? (Luke x. 16.) Let 
one judge by all these traits what the inspira- 
tion of the New Testament behooved to have 
been, compared with that of the Old; and let 
him say whether, while the latter was wholly 
and entirely prophetic (inspired) that of the 
New could be anything less!” 

He continues: “But this is not all; listen 
further to the promises that were made to them 
for the performance of such a work. No human 


®“Theopneustia,” page 75. 


Three Great Occasions 183 


language can express with greater force the 
most absolute inspiration. These promises 
were for the most part addressed to them on 
three great occasions: first, when sent out for 
the first time to preach the kingdom of God 
(Matthew x. 19, 20); next, when Jesus him- 
self delivered public discourses on the Gospel 
before an immense multitude, gathered by tens 
of thousands around him (Luke xxi. 12); 
third, when he uttered his last denunciation 
against Jerusalem and the Jewish nation. (Mat- 
thew xiii. 2; Luke xxi. 14-16.) 

“But when they deliver you up, take no 
thought how or what ye shall speak (was 
» 7), for it shall be given you in that same 
hour what ye shall speak. or it is not ye 
that speak but the spirit of your Father which 
speaketh in you.” .... “And when they bring 
you into the synagogues, and unto magis- 
trates and powers, take ye no thought, how or 
what thing ye shall answer, or what ye shall 
say, for the Holy Ghost shall teach you in the 
same hour what ye ought to say.”. . . . “Take 
no thought beforehand what ye shall speak, 
neither do ye premeditate, but whatsoever shall 
be given you in that hour, speak ye; for it is 
not ye that speak but the Holy Ghost.” .... 
“Settle it therefore in your hearts, not to med- 
itate before what ye shall answer; for I will 


184 Inspired to Write as Well as to Speak 


give you a mouth and wisdom which all your 
adversaries shall not be able to gainsay and re- 
sist.’””* 

After thus grouping these remarkable prom- 
ises of Jesus to the Apostles, this devout writer 
pertinently and irresistibly inquires: “We 
ask if it were possible in any language to ex- 
press more absolutely the most entire inspira- 
tion, and to declare with more precision that 
the very words were then vouched by God and 
given to the Apostles ?’” 

To all this, however, it may be objected that 
these promises had exclusive reference to oral 
utterances and imply nothing as to the writings 
with which we have to do. To which we ask 
in reply, is it reasonable to suppose their fleet- 
ing utterances of an hour were to be guaranteed 
and the permanent writings required to pre- 
serve the faith for all time and which they only 
could supply, were to be the product of uncer- 
tain, human composition? Were the Apostles 
reeds of a day shaken by chance winds of the 
spirit and yielding a verbal foliage, which, fall- 
ing and decaying, made loam to fertilize nar- 
row areas in their own time, or were they as 
trees planted by the rivers of water, striking 
their roots into a perpetual moisture, and yield- 


*“Theopneustia,” page 76. 
STIbid., page 77, 


The Apostles Claimed Inspiration 185 


ing leaves for the healing of all nations in all 
lands? To quote again from Dr. Gaussen, “Is 
it not evident enough that if the most entire in- 
spiration were assured to them for passing exi- 
gencies, to shut the mouths of some wicked 
men, to conjure the perils of a day, and to sub- 
serve interests of the narrowest range; if it 
were promised them, notwithstanding that the 
very words of their answers should then be giv- 
en to them by means of a calm, mighty but in- 
explicable operation of the Holy Ghost—is it 
not evident enough that the same assistance 
could not be refused to those same men, when 
like the ancient prophets they had to continue 
the book of God’s ‘Oracles’; and so to hand 
down to all succeeding ages the laws of the 
Kingdom of Heaven, and describe the glories 
of Jesus Christ and the scenes of Eternity ?” 
The evidence that the Apostles believed that 
these promises extended to their written as 
well as to their spoken words is abundant and 
convincing, and the weight of their testimony 
to their own inspiration is increased by a con- 
sideration which is thus presented by the Rev. 
Henry Wace, A.M., in the Bampton Lectures of 
1879. He says: “These men were not Pagans 
by birth and education, and accustomed like 
Greeks to think lightly of a Divine Being and 


*“Theopneustia,” pages 77, 78. 


186 The Credentials of an Apostle 


of communications with Him. They were 
Jews, who had the third commandment con- 
tinually before their eyes, and for whom the 
very name of God possessed an awful and al- 
most unutterable solemnity.’ Is it credible 
that these men—John, Peter, Paul, James and 
Jude—Hebrews of the Hebrews—would, with- 
out authority from their Lord, have intruded 
themselves among the inspired writers of their 
nation? Would they have allowed and encour- 
aged Mark and Luke, or any other of their im- 
mediate pupils, to have done so unless they were 
inspired, without monumental rebuke ? 

They knew that they composed an inner and 
exclusive circle in the New Kingdom. Wit- 
ness the care, though mistaken haste, of St. 
Peter and the Jerusalem Church, in the choice 
of a successor to Judas—a blunder not charge- 
able to inspired men, for the Holy Ghost had 
not yet come upon them? Observe how the 
opponents of St. Paul at Corinth were ready 
to question the apostleship of him who was the 
divinely appointed successor to Judas, because 
he had not been one of the original Twelve. It 
was necessary for him to exhibit his credentials 
and he did it: “Am TI not an Apostle? Am I 
not free? Have I not seen Jesus Christ, our 
Lord?” (1 Qorinthians ix. 1.) “Truly,” 


7™The Foundations of Faith,” page 73. 


“Brethren,” Not “Apostles” 187 


says he, “the signs of an Apostle were wrought 
among you in all patience, in signs, and won- 
ders and mighty deeds.” Note how he meets 
the same questioning of his authority in the 
Galatian churches: “Paul an Apostle (not of 
men, neither by man, but by Jesus Christ and 
God the Father who raised him from the dead) 
and all the brethren which are with me unto 
the churches of Galatia.” Fraternity with 
“the brethren” he acknowledges, but no par- 
ticipation by them in his apostleship. In the 
salutation to the first. Corinthian Epistle, Sos- 
thenes is with him, but he is only a “brother.” 
Tenderly as Timothy was loved by him, and 
highly esteemed, he is carefully excluded from 
participation in the apostleship when in the 
second Epistle to the same church he begins 
“Paul, an Apostle of Jesus Christ by the will 
of God, and Timothy, our brother.” But when 
he comes to talk of Peter, James and John, 
they are “Apostles” (Galatians i. 19), always 
and everywhere. | 

Moreover, if the Apostles had, without au- 
thority from Jesus, undertaken to set up a 
claim to a peculiar order and a divine inspira- 
tion, the churches, in which were many Jews 
who held inspired writings in a_ reverence 
amounting to awe, would not have allowed the 
claim. When the church at Berea, for ex- 


188 An Incident that is an Index 


ample, was organized, the converted J ews, who 
were its first members, did not receive the 
word of the new Evangelists until they 
“searched the Scriptures whether those things 
were so.” (Acts xvii. 11.) For this the his- 
torian of the Acts does not censure them, but on 
account of it does rather eulogize them, declar- 
ing them to have been “more noble than those in 
Thessalonica.” (Acts xvii. 11.) The incident 
is an index to a prevalent spirit which makes 
it unthinkable that the Apostles could have 
claimed inspiration, or the Jewish churches 
have allowed the claim, unless it had been well 
founded. But, as we shall see, the claim was 
both set up by the Apostles and acknowledged. 
by the churches. | 

Writing to the church at Ephesus, St. Paul 
says: “Whereby when ye read what I wrote 
before in few words, ye may understand my 
knowledge in the mystery of Christ, which in 
other ages was not made known unto the gons 
of men, as it is now revealed unto his holy 
Apostles and Prophets by the Spirit.” (Ephe- 
sians ili. 4, 5.) In writing to the Corinthi- 
ans, he places himself and his fellow Apostles 
above the prophets: “And God hath set some 
in the church, first Apostles, secondarily proph- 
ets, thirdly teachers, after that miracles, then 
gifts of healings, helps, governments, diversi- 


St. Paul and St. John Din i? 


ties of tongues.” (1 Corinthians xii. 28.) In 
harmony with this position, which he claimed 
for himself, the most elevated in the en- 
tire hierarchy of the supernaturally aided 
agents in the church, he inquires, “What? 
came the word of God out from you? Or 
came it unto youonly? If any man think him- 
self to be a prophet, or spiritual, let him ac- 
knowledge that the things that I write unto you 
are the commandments of the Lord.” (1 Corin- 
. thians xiv. 36, 37.) To the same purpose 
writes St. John: ‘We are of God: he that 
knoweth God heareth us; he that is not of God 
heareth not us. Hereby know we the spirit of 
truth and the spirit of error.” (1 John iv. 6.) 

Now, if these writings be truly the writings 
of the Apostles—and as we have seen no one 
now denies the Pauline authorship of the Corin- 
thian and Galatian Epistles—the Twelve were 
either inspired, as they claim to have been, or 
they perpetrated a fraud on the world, or they 
were the victims of an hallucination. The the- 
ory of fraud is excluded by the singular purity 
of their lives, their martyrdoms for the truth 
they uttered, their impressions upon their con- 
temporaries, and their enduring power over the 
thoughts and lives of men in all subsequent 
times. The writings themselves forbid the 
idea of hallucination. There is in them a 


190 Neither False Nor Fanatical 


serenity of movement, coupled with a cer- 
tain sublime simplicity that no _halluci- 
nated intellect could momentarily attain to, 
much less permanently maintain. And these 
striking qualities are as manifest in their 
later as in their earlier compositions. Halluci- 
nations are always meteoric, they burn more 
and more fiercely as they move, and are finally 
extinguished, being consumed by the heat 
which is constantly increased by their mo- 
tion. But Paul, in sight of his death, 
wrote as calmly and coherently to Timothy as 
in earlier days he wrote convincingly to the 
Galatian churches. The mighty images of 
the Revelation never overmastered the spirit 
of the Exile of Patmos. St. Peter’s letters are 
equally calm, clear and consecutive in thought 
and expression. 

But if it be said there is no proof that shows 
these writings to have been from the pens of 
Apostles and their companions (a groundless 
statement as we have shown), and that therefore 
we do not know certainly that they claimed in- 
spiration, we answer, if anonymous writers 
have put out forgeries under the names of the 
Apostles, why did these forgers put a claim of 
Inspiration in the mouths of the men whose 
names they forged, unless the men thus person- 
ated were accustomed to make the claim for 


Anonymous Giants 191 


themselves? When a man plays the part of 
another, does he play it naturally or unnatural- 
ly? Moreover, how comes it that so many 
anonymous geniuses appeared about this time, 
who combined gifts equal to the task of success- 
fully imitating Apostles, with modesty so great 
that they forever concealed themselves, and 
with dishonesty so deep that they could perpe- 
trate without a scruple the most astounding 
fraud? The hypotheses of sceptical criticism 
require to sustain them enough dead giants to 
fill with bones the ghastly valley of Ezekiel’s 
vision. They have never, however, been able 
to get any wind to blow on their cretaceous 
creations to make even one of them rise up and 
tell his name. Some years ago Herr Emil 
Brusch rescued from their hiding-places at 
Deir-el-Bahari the mummies of the Pharaohs, 
and sailed down the Nile towards Cairo in the 
steamer of the Bulak Museum, with a ship- 
load of “royal carcasses.” Their names could 
be determined, though they had been buried 
since the days of Moses and the Exodus. But 
the critics laboriously paddle leaky barges up 
the stream of the apostolic history, loaded down 
with anonymous giants as mysterious and incon- 
ceivable as the heroes of the “Arabian Nights.” 
Again, how could churches, in which there 
were so many Jewish members, trained to the 


192 “A Fine Opening’ 


lifetime habit of holding inspired writings in 
highest reverence, fall such easy victims to 
the deception of the nameless giants? Fur- 
thermore, the genius of the race is not yet ex- 
hausted. Why can not some of the critics give 
us a successful imitation of Paul or Peter or 
John now? ‘There is a fine opening for the 
manufacture of a new Epistle by Paul, if we 
may trust what the critics themselves tell us. 
They tell us an Epistle to the Laodiceans has 
been lost. The church of Laodicea was not far 
from the churches of Ephesus and Colosse, and 
all the material for reconstructing the record of 
the region and the time is in the hands of the 
critics. Let some one of them write a letter 
that can stand between the Ephesian and Colos- 
sian Kpistles, which the church has attributed 
to St. Paul, and not raise in mankind a sense 
of infinite incongruity! Some one of them or 
all of them together—if they could only manage 
to agree with each other for one day—ought to 
be equal to the task, if anonymous writers of the 
first and second centuries were equal to it. 
“Some of them can treat Paul as a tutor would 
his pupil, can rearrange his thoughts, can point 
out to him which are the important and which 
the unimportant, can indicate where he wan- 
ders from his subject and where he has lost the 


What Uninspired Men Can Do 193 


clue to his own meaning.”” Surely men. so 
learned and wise can write the kind of an 
Epistle which ought to have gone to the Laodi- 
ceans, if they can not recover the one which 
they say is lost. We do not ask them to find 
the lost one, because they have no skill to find 
lost things in the apostolic era, having lost a 
whole generation of anonymous geniuses _be- 
longing to that period. But they imagine 
well. Let them try their hands on imagining 

an Epistle to the Laodiceans. We do not ask 
a long one. We will be satisfied if they will 
give us one no longer than the eight short 
verses of the message to the Laodiceans, found 
in the last paragraph of the third chapter of 
the Revelation of St. John. 

They need not risk the venture. The world 
knows what uninspired men can do—and_ the 
best they can do—when they attempt to make 
Apostles walk and talk before us. Have we not 
the Apocryphal Gospels? Have we not the books 
of the authors of Ben Hur and Quo Vadis? 
Let any fair man, who has a mind to do so, 
compare the account in the Acts, of St. Paul’s 
experience on the way to Damascus with the 
appearance of Christ to St. Peter, set out in the 
sixty-ninth chapter of Quo Vadis. Sien- 

*A reference in Wace’s “Foundations of Faith,” 


page 75, to Matthew Arnold’s “St. Paul and Protest- 
antism,” pages 150-160. 
13 


194 The Testimony of the Church 


kiewicz is not deficient in imagination or in 
power of expression ; but between his novel and 
St. Luke’s narrative there is an infinite dis- 
tance. He seems to have the advantage of St. 
Luke in all that mere earthly art can furnish, 
but he is yet far below him in the strength and 
nobility of the impression made on the mind of 
the reader. He seems to want some high, un- 
earthly quality which one meets on every page 
of the Acts, and if one were required to name 
the quality that is wanting, could he use a 
better word than—lInspiration ? 

But we are not left to arguments of this sort, 
effective as they may be. The church is not of 
yesterday. Her testimony is entitled to con- 
sideration. And let it be observed that it is her 
testimony and not her authority which is in- 
voked. The New Testament canon was not fixed 
by councils, but it is established by evidence. 
Nor does it appeal to any subjective impres- 
sions as the sole ground for its acceptance. 
There has been a growing fashion in certain 
quarters within recent years to set up some 
such vain and fickle standard by which to test 
the Scriptures. One of the exponents of this 
view thus states the position of himself and of 
his comrades in arms against orthodoxy: ‘We 
determine the inspiration of the book from its 
internal character and the voice of the Holy 


Romanists and Illuminati 195 


9 


But we 
respectfully inquire if the Holy Spirit said 
nothing to the church in the first four centuries 
when the received canon, so long the code of 
Christianity, was forming? Again, who shall 
decide between two believers of the present day 
even, as to the inspiration of a book, if they 
should happen to report differently as to the im- 
port of the voice of the Holy Spirit? This 
standard clearly does not attest the authority 
of the Scriptures, but makes every man a law 
unto himself in the matter of divine revelation. 
At bottom it is the same as that of the 
Roman Catholic Church, making its appeal to 
an Infallible Pope or to Infallible Councils. 
The only difference between these new IJlumi- 
natt and the Romanists is in the number of 
the Popes provided for by each. The Roman- 
ist has one and the [//wminati have as many as 
there are men who can be found to discard the 
testimony of the Church in all ages as a venera- 
ble witness, and to appeal to their own confi- 
dent consciousness to determine the fact 
of inspiration. We do not feel free to 
join ourselves to one Pope or to a multitude of 


Spirit speaking in it to the believer.” 


Popes, to a single lord or to “lords many.” It 
seems safer to follow reason and reach con- 


*Dr. C. A. Briggs in the “American Review,” for 
July, 1891, 


196 To the Law and to the Testimony 


clusions from testimony than to yield submis- 
sion to impressions, and to raise fleeting emo- 
tional states to the level of “Oracles of God,” 
or rather, to elevate them above the divine ora- 
cles. To the law and to the testimony we take 
our appeal—to the law of reason and to the 
testimony of history. 

Before taking up the witness of the early | 
church to the authority of the New Testament 
—the church which allowed as just and true 
the great claim of the apostolic writings to in- 
spiration—two general observations should be 
made. | 

The first is, that these writings made such 
an overwhelming impression on the early 
churches that an amazing work of copying and 
circulating them was speedily accomplished. 
Epistles sent originally to the church at Corinth 
are in a marvelously brief time found in Syria, 
Africa, Gaul and Italy. In an age when books 
were made by processes painful and expensive, it 
is a very strange fact to find churches composed. 
in the main of poor and illiterate peasants 
bringing such wide-spread results to pass as 
are indicated by the rapid and extensive circu- 
lation of the books of the New Testament. 

In the second place, no councils were called to 
decide what was and what was not an apostolic 
writing. Such questions, if they arose at all, 


A Matter of Fact 197 


seemed to have been treated as matters of fact 
upon which any man having the facts before 
him was as competent as another to pass. This 
is true of the early part of the second century 
and also of the period of Eusebius. There is 
no hurry and no superstition in the investiga- 
tion. The churches acted not as people do who 
are trying to make up books, but as pious peo- 
ple who are trying to find and follow sacred 
books already made. The pronounced Hebrew 
tendency to hold inspired writings in the great- 
est reverence was evidently perpetuated in the 
early Christian churches. They were little dis- 
posed to “believe every spirit,” but did rather 
“try the spirits,” which came to them in the 
form of books which claimed to be inspired. (1 
John iv. 1.) And they had means by which 
to try them which are not in our hands—no, not 
in the hands of even our most self-assured 
critics. We know, for example, to a certainty, 
that Eusebius and Athanasius had precious man- 
uscripts before them which have not reached 
our time. 

With these considerations in mind, let us 
consider briefly some of the testimony of them 
who have been called “the Fathers,” and their 
immediate successors. In a former chapter 
(Chapter VIII.) we have examined some of the 
statements which they make. We may now, 


198 “The Apostolic Fathers” 


therefore, make a more brief and hurried re- 
view of a part of what they affirm. 

A recent and careful writer of well-known 
competency condenses some of this great mass 
of testimony thus: ‘We have some remains of 
what were called the Apostolic Fathers, Clem- 
ent of Rome, Polycarp of Smyrna, and Igna- , 
tius of Antioch, between the years 90 and 180, 
by which we learn that the writings of the 
Apostles had not only extended beyond the nar- 
row circle of their origin, but were already ex- 
ercising a marked influence on the teaching. In 
them we find mention of certain Epistles of 
Paul, and also of the evangelic history and of 
certain words of Jesus, the two being com- 
monly called the Gospel and the Epistle. In this 
appeal to written records is the fruitful germ 
of the deference subsequently paid to the New 
Testament writers. It is not contended that 
these Apostolic Fathers had a complete canon 
in their hands. That may or may not have 
been the case. The recognition of the canon 
was doubtless as gradual as its formation had 
been. All that we are concerned to establish is 
that these Fathers had New Testament author- 
ities to which they referred as genuine and de- 
cisive. The Old Testament was already in 
their possession, and they had long been accus- 
tomed to use it in public and in private; but 


The Testimony in Detail 199 


now they had something more, to wit: The 
Christian truth contained in Christ’s life, 
whether conveyed orally or in writing, and the 
instructions of the Apostles, given either in 
Epistles, or through the traditional arrange- 
ments they had made in the churches.” 

To exhibit this testimony more in detail, we 
add: that Clement of Rome, who was a contem- 
porary of the Apostles, appeals to the Gospels, 
the Epistle to Ephesians, the first Epistle to Cor- 
inthians, the Epistle of St. James, the first Epis- 
tle of Peter, and the Epistle to the Hebrews; that 
Ignatius, who was martyred probably not later 
than A. D. 107, quotes from the Ephesians, the 
Gospels of St. Matthew and St. John, the first 
Epistle of St. Peter, the Epistle of St. James, 
and the Pauline Epistles to the Romans, the 
Corinthians, the Thessalonians, and Timothy ; 
that Polycarp, who knew St. John, and became 
a Christian before “the beloved disciple died,” 
cites the Synoptic Gospels, the Acts, Seven 
Epistles of St. Paul, the first Epistle of St. Peter 
and the first of St. John. 

It will be observed that the number of the 
books of the New Testament in the hands of 
men, thus widely separated and at a period so 
early, is a wonderful testimony to the reverence 


Talbot W. Chambers, in an article on the Canon, 
contained in “The Inspired Word,” pages 301, 302. 


200 “The Apologists” of the Second Century 


paid to the apostolic writings from the first. 
What but the acknowledgment of their inspira- 
tion can explain this vast energy of copying 
and distribution? That these venerable wit- 
nesses do not give us proofs that they had all 
the books is not strange, nor does it materially 
affect this argument. The wonder is that they 
had so many. It is more than probable that 
many of their own writings have perished and 
that if we had all they wrote we should find 
attestations of all the books of the New Testa- 
ment. Certain it is that we have very remark- 
able testimony from their immediate success- 
ors in the Second Century. 

The testimony of some of these “Apologists” 
of the second century is thus summarized by 
the learned and lamented Dr. Summers: “Pa- 
pias, Bishop of Hierapolis in Asia, who lived 
about the time of the death of John the Evan- 
gelist, cites the Gospels of Matthew and Mark 
by name, and alludes to other books of the New 
Testament. Justin Martyr (A. D. 140) al- 
ludes frequently to the Gospels as ‘Memoirs of 
the Apostles and their Companions,’ and 
quotes from the Acts and many of the Epistles, 
and says, ‘the Revelation of Christ was written 
by John, one of the Apostles.’ 

“Tatian (A. D. 172) composed a Diatessaron 
or Harmony of the Four Gospels. Melito (A. 


Irenaeus, Clement and Origen 201 


D. 170) wrote a commentary on the Revelation 
of St. John. 

“Trenaeus (A. D. 170) bears testimony to ev- 
ery book of the New Testament, except the 
Epistle of Philemon, 3 John and Jude. He 
speaks of the ‘Code of the New Testament as 
of the Old,’ and calls them both ‘the Oracles 
and writings dictated by His Word and Spirit.’ 

“Clement of Alexandria (A. D. 200) states 
the order in which the Four Gospels were writ- 
ten, and quotes all the books of the New Testa- 
ment by name, and so amply, says Horne, that 
his citations would fill a considerable volume. 
He traveled in quest of information, accurately 
examined the subject, and thus gave great 
weight to his testimony.” 

To these may be added the testimony of 
Origen, who lived A. D. 185-258, one of the 
most voluminous writers of his own or of any 
other age. In his writings he quotes from ev- 
ery book in the New Testament, so that it has 
been said if the Bible were destroyed, the books 
of the New Testament might be almost entirely 
restored from the quotations he has made from 
them. He gives a catalogue of the books, as we 
receive them. 

We have a very ancient “fragment” (A. D. 


u«Systematic Theology,” edited by John J. Tigert, 
D.D., LL.D., page 425. 


202 “Canon of Muratorv” 


170) known as the “Canon of Muratori,” found 
in the Ambrosian Library at Milan. It begins 
with Luke, but calling him “‘the third,” plainly 
shows that the earlier portion, which has been 
torn off, contained Matthew and Mark, and in- 
cludes all the books as we now have them, ex: 
cept the Epistles of Peter, the first Epistle of 
John, the Epistle of James, and the Epistle 
to the Hebrews. The explanation of the omis- 
sion of the books named is not easy, but since 
it contains in a notice of John’s Gospel a quota- 
tion from John’s first Epistle, the omission is 
no proof that the author rejected the books he 
omits. The explanation is probably found in 
the mutilation of the text, which seems to be 
made up of detached pieces. | 
Eusebius (A. D. 315), who must undoubt- 
edly have had access to manuscript treas- 
ures beyond all that we can reach, since he was 
attached to the Court of the Emperor Constan- 
tine, in the third book of his Ecclesiastical His- 
tory, informs us that in his day the books claim- 
ing to be regarded as Scriptures were divided 
into three classes: the universally accepted ; 
those that were received but not unanimously ; 
and those which were utterly rejected. He 
names the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Epistles 
of St. James and St. Jude, the second Epistle 
of St. Peter, the second and third Epistles of 


Eusebius and Others 208 


St. John and the Revelation, as not unani- 
mously accepted. The other books, as we have 
them, he names as universally received. All 
other books mentioned by him he classes as uni- 
versally rejected. Here is evidently an honest 
historian, with excellent opportunity for re- 
search, reaching a conclusion which he can- 
didly expresses. The books which he names 
as not unanimously received, as we have seen, 
are confirmed by other credible witnesses be- 
fore his time. Of witnesses contemporary with 
Eusebius and of a little later period may be 
mentioned: Athanasius (A. D. 315), Ept- 
phanius (A. D. 370), Rufinus (A. D. 390), 
Augustine (A. D. 394), and the forty bishops 
who composed the Council of Carthage (A. D. 
397), all of whom give the canon as we have it. 
The catalogues of Cyril of Jerusalem (A. D. 
340), of the Council of Laodicea (A. D. 364), 
and of Gregory of Nazianzen (A. D. 375), are 
the same as our canon, except the Revelation is 
omitted. Philarte, Bishop of Brescia (A. D. 
380), omits Hebrews and Revelation from his 
list, though in other parts of his works he ac- 
knowledges them, so that an omission is not al- 
ways conclusive evidence that a book was re- 
jected. 

All these testimonies show how carefully all 
the books of the canon were scanned in the 


204 Remarkable Unanimity 


post-apostolic age, and how marvelously they 
were circulated in the apostolic age. If we 
had a tithe of such proof to attest a newly dis- 
covered work of Tacitus or Herodotus, such a 
book would be instantly and without contro- 
- versy received by the critics. No such inter- 
est in these books, or care for them, could have 
arisen if the early church from the days of the 
Apostles forward had not believed them in- 
spired. And it is a remarkable fact that to 
this day universal Christianity, whether found 
in the Protestant, Roman or Greek churches, 
acknowledge the same New Testament Scrip- 
tures. About other things they differ, but 
when the standard of truth is reached, the con- 
troversy is at anend. Is there any other ques- 
tion open to discussion among men about which 
such unanimity has ever been reached ? 
Moreover, these books set themselves apart 
by unmistakable qualities all their own. So 
marked is this quality ingrained in them that 
the debate over the canon, during the period 
of its formation, never took the direction of 
bringing in any other books not now accepted, 
but was always of doubt as to whether a few 
of those we have ought to have been 
admitted. This disposition did not bespeak 
a superstitious spirit hunting marvelous writ- 
ings, but did rather exhibit a spirit of 


Internal Evidence 205 


scrupulous care, sifting evidence that no trace 
of error should creep into the sacred books of 
the church. 

In addition to this array of historic proof, we 
may appeal to internal evidence in corrobora- 
tion of it. There is a truth in the much- 
abused and much-perverted dictum of Cole- 
ridge that ‘whatever finds me bears witness for 
itself that it has proceeded from the Holy 
Ghost.” There is a divine tone in the books of 
the New Testament. To their inspired tone 
Neander testifies: “A phenomenon singular in 
its kind, is the striking difference between the 
writings of the Apostles and those of the Apos- 
tolic Fathers who were so nearly their contem- 
poraries. In other cases transitions are wont 
to be gradual, but in this instance we observe 
sudden change. There is not gentle grada- 
tion here, but all at once an abrupt transition 
from one style of language to another, a phe- 
nomenon which should lead us to acknowledge 


the fact of a special agency of the Divine . 


Spirit in the souls of the Apostles, and of a 
new creative element in the first period.”” No 
writer of all earth’s celebrities has ever been 
able to catch and repeat this tone. Surely it is 
none other than that of the Good Shepherd, 
whose voice His sheep never mistake. 


2“Church History,” Vol. I., 656. 


206 Has the Greatest Truth Perished? 


If anywhere the Words of Jesus and the 
Mind of the Spirit have been preserved, it is 
in the New Testament. If they have been lost, 
then we have the strangest series of events in 
history. Buckle says, ‘““No great truth which 
has once been found has ever afterwards been 
lost.” But if the New Testament be not the 
Word of God, the God-man, who came to bear 
witness to the truth, has passed away and left 
no certain truth concerning himself behind 
him; he has led Apostles into a blasphemous de- 
ception which continues even into our times; 
around this profane deception has sprung up 
the church, the most unaccountable institution 
among men, if its sacred books be fables; in the 
propagation of the delusive writings has sprung 
up the highest civilizations in the earth, and 
within their grasp seems to be the conquest of 
the world. In short, the greatest truth that ever 
appeared among men has hopelessly perished 
since Jesus went away, and the greatest delusion 
has taken its place—and behold the monstrous 
delusion is the hope of men, the only chance 
they have for a Revelation from God. 


“History of Civilization,” I., 215. 


XII 


HAVE THE SACRED BOOKS AUTHEN- 
TICATED BY GOD WHEN HE WAS 
AMONG MEN REACHED US IN A SUB- 
STANTIALLY UNCORRUPTED STATE? 


“The grass withereth and the flower thereof falleth 
away; but the word of the Lord endureth forever. 
And this is the word which by the Gospel is preached 
unto you.”—St. Peter. 


“If, on the one hand, we are forced to confess that 
the labors of scholars present us only with succes- 
sive approximations to a result the absolute attain- 
ment of which is impossible, on the other hand we 
may congratulate ourselves on the fact, on which all 
competent scholars are agreed, that in our incapac- 
ity to construct an absolutely perfect text our loss is 
practically infinitesimal, for that no important prin- 
ciple of the Christian religion is compromised or 
perilled thereby.”—J. J. Lias. 


“T find more sure marks of authenticity in the Bible 
than in any profane history whatever.’—Sir Isaac 
Newton. 


“All human discoveries seem to be made only for 
the purpose of confirming more and more strongly 
the truth contained in the sacred Scriptures.’—NSir 
John Herschel, 


XII 


Haver tue Sacrep Booxs AUTHENTICATED BY 
Gop Wuen Her Was Amona Men 
Reacuep Us 1n 4 SusstantraLtty Uncor- 
RUPTED STATE ? 


It Has been imagined by some that unless an 
unbroken line of miracles has attended the 
Scriptures to preserve them against corruption 
we can not be sure we have the books as they 
were originally inspired, however we may be 
assured of their divine quality when first writ- 
ten. or example, some years ago, the Rev. 
H. R. Haweis, of London, flippantly said, in 
an address on Inspiration before the students 
of Harvard University, that the doctrine of in- 
spiration involved by necessity the notion of 
inspired copyists, inspired printers and even of. 
inspired printers’ devils. This shallow and 
irreverent utterance expresses a_ superficial 
theory which is at once the superstition of some 
pious but thoughtless people and the boast of 
some sceptical minds equally thoughtless. And 
curiously enough the superstition of the pious 
has led them much more nearly to the truth 
than the scepticism of the unbelievers. 


“The Inspired Word,” page 14, 
14 209 


210 Better Than Autographs 


As a matter of fact, without miraculous in- 
terference, or even the intrusion of ecclesiasti- 
cal authority, the Scriptures have reached us in 
a form more convincing than if they bore the 
autographs of the inspired writers. If we had 
such autographs, who would attest them to us, 
and who would attest that attestation, and how 
would an unbroken line of such attestations 
down the ages be secured without a continuous 
miracle? But as we have seen (Chapter ITI.) 
a method of endless miracles would not only 
subvert God’s established order of nature, 
which is inconsistent with the divine plan, but 
it would also make revelation impossible by de- 
stroying the only means by which a revelation 
can be accredited. Both the God of Nature 
and the God of Revelation use the portentous 
sparingly. Hence, “No miracle was wrought 
in fixing the canon of Scripture or preserving 
the letter of the text. It would have been dis- 
tinetly at variance with the recognized way of 
God to interfere after this sort with responsible 
human agency.’” 

But behold the miracle of miracles! God 
has, without a miracle, brought to pass what no 
miracle, nor series of miracles, could have ac- 


*“The Witnesses to Christ,” Bishop Alpheus W. Wil- 
son, page 238, 


The Old Testament Oanon Bia 


complished so well. We have Scriptures as 
much better than autograph copies as an at- 
tested and recorded deed is better than one un- 
attested and unrecorded, however genuine. 
The God who left not himself without witness 
in any of the nations (Acts xiv. 17) has set 
round about the Hebrew and Christian Script- 
ures a great cloud of witnesses that His Word 
might run and be glorified among all nations 
and in all times. 

Four majestic figures guard the Old Testa- 
ment Scriptures—the Jewish, Greek, Roman 
Catholic, and Protestant Churches. No book 
can creep into the canon, nor passage, to cor- 
rupt, without some or all of these witnesses in- 
stantly detecting and exposing the fraud. Nor 
is the force of this statement weakened, but 
rather strengthened, by the fact that the Roman 
Catholic Council of Trent, convened December, 
1545, inserted what are known as the Apocry- 
phal books in their canon, and that in 1692 the 
Eastern Church tardily followed the vicious 
example. The date of the transaction discred- 
its it—in both instances. The motion to re 
consider the canon came too late, by over a 
thousand years, and ought not to have been en- 
tertained. The motive of the act being to af- 
fect and hinder the Lutheran Reformers suf- 
ficiently accounts for it. The venerable wit- 


212 Most “Accurately Transmitted’ 


ness of Judaism confutes this apostate 
testimony, tainted with the suspicion of being 
made to order. The faithful witness of a 
unanimous Protestantism withstands it. And 
highest of all stands up against it the testi- 
mony of Jesus, who never, so far as the Gospels © 
show, quoted one line from the Apochrypha— 
not even an “echo,” to use the apt word of 
Bishop Ellicott. To the integrity of all the 
other books of the canon without the Apoery- 
pha, all the witnesses testify in solemn and 
sublime agreement, and with them join the cel- 
ebrated Philo, a contemporary of the Apostles, 
and Josephus, another of their contemporaries, 
if possible still more celebrated. 

As to the purity of the text, we may safely 
trust the testimony of wise and scholarly men, 
who, with ample means at hand for the inves- 
tigation of such matters, have reached and pub- 
lished to the world their conclusions upon the 
subject. Speaking of the remarkable safe- 
guards which have been thrown around the Old 
Testament Scriptures, Dr. William Henry 
Green, a scholar whose words are weighty 
among the learned, says: “It may be safely 
said that no other work of antiquity has been so 


accurately transmitted.”” And this conclusion 


“General Introduction to the Old Testament,” 
page 181. 


“The Truce of God” 213 


of Princeton’s revered “Professor of Oriental 
and Old Testament Literature,” will not be de- 
nied by any competent scholar of any school of 
thought. Moreover, it is confirmed by the fact 
which the critical can not obscure nor the un- 
learned misunderstand, that Jews and Chris- 
tians, of all sects and creeds, while differing 
about almost all other questions and carrying 
on, time out of mind, endless controversies, all 
are agreed when this point is reached. The Old 
Testament Scriptures, the stream upon which 
the truth of God is borne to men, like the great. 
Canal of Suez, is shielded by a compact be- 
tween all the believers in Revelation the wide 
world over—a compact little short of a miracle. 
It is covered by “the truce of God.” 

But what of the inaccuracies and blemishes 
which a certain school of critics claim to have 
discovered in the old Testament Scrip- 
tures? Shall we bind blemished books en bloc 
and make Jesus the authority for their perfec- 
tion? By no means! Let us stand firmly up- 
on the noble words of Coleridge, that “He who 
begins by loving Christianity better than Truth 
will proceed by loving his own sect or church 
better than Christianity, and end in loving 
himself better than all.” But while loving the 


*Mor. and Rel. Aphor., XXV., Works, New York, 
Edition 1853, Vol. I., page 173. 


214 “Doubting Castles” Surrendered 


truth supremely, let us not too quickly fall in 
with the merely plausible, and imagine it to be 
the truth, because certain called “higher crit- 
ics’ say so. There is a centrifugal disposition 
of mind which carries some men beyond the 
orbit of Truth, where they are more ready to 
believe in the Infallibility of the Crities than 
in the Inspiration of the Scriptures. Yet 
nothing can be more certain than that orthodox 
Christianity has been able for nearly twenty 
centuries to maintain every essential position it 
has assumed in defense of the truth once deliv- 
ered to the saints, while Criticism has been 
forced to evacuate “Doubting Castles” without 
number. It will serve the purposes of both 
argument and illustration to revert to some in- 
stances in point. It has not been very long 
since the critics averred that St. Luke was in 
error when in his account of St. Paul’s visit 
to Cyprus he called the governor of the island 
a “pro-consul,”” whereas the critics said Sergius 
Paulus should have been called a “pro-preetor,” 
because Strabo and Dion Cassius Cocceianus 
named Cyprus as an imperial district, and 
its governor should have been called, there- 
fore, a “pro-pretor.” But later it was dis- 
covered that the same historian Dion Cas- 
sius Cocceianus had recorded, that while Au- 
gustus did hold Cyprus as an _ imperial 


Correcting St. Luke 215 


province for a time, he eventually exchanged 
it for another district, and thus it became a 
senatorial province, and “pro-consul” was the 
proper title for its governor. Still later, 
coins of the time were found, and these also 
called the rulers of Cyprus ‘“pro-consuls.” 
Still further, General Cesnola, in his excava- 
tions on Cyprus, came upon a coin bearing the 
inscription, ‘in the pro-consulship of Paulus.” 
And so Luke was right after all, and it is 
evident that his narrative is no “pious make- 
up,” or the writer would have fallen into the 
error of using the word, “pro-preetor,” which 
had generally been the proper title for the gov- 
ernor of Cyprus, but was not the proper title 
when Paul was there. In this connection it is 
pertinent to inquire why the critics gave judg- 
ment against Luke and in favor of Strabo and 
Dion Cassius Cocceianus in the first in- 
stance? Have the critics a bias against 
ancient writings if they happen to _ be 
Christian documents, and a bias for them 
if they happen to be Pagan documents? 
Have Pagan histories for centuries had the care 
of the church around them to keep them pure? 

Again, as lately as fifteen or twenty years 
ago, the critics sneered at “the inaccuracies of 
the Bible in regard to the Hittites.” But a 
broad light has recently been thrown on the 


216 The Hittites and Babylonians 


history of the Hittites by the Egyptian, Assyr- 
ian, and Hittite inscriptions, and the Bible 
history has been confirmed and the critics con- 
founded. The book of Daniel was once cor- 
rected by the critics in the matter of the kings 
of Babylon. But archeology has with obsti- 
nate truthfulness sided with Daniel and 
against the critics. They are working on 
Daniel yet, being much disturbed by the Greek 
names of certain musical instruments to which 
he alludes, and drawing immense inferences 
from the small premises with which they start. 
But Mr. Flinders Petrie’s excavations in Egypt 
lead him to think that, long before the Exile, 
Greeks and Jews must have come into contact 
at Tahpanhes, and that “the Greek names of 
musical instruments may have been heard in 
the courts of Solomon’s Temple.” And so 
Daniel may again be found correct, to the con- 
fusion of the critics. At any rate, if a bit of 
raillery be permissible, we may say, ortho- 
doxy need not take fright at the sound of these 
musical instruments and fly away from the God 
of Daniel and his friends, to worship the image 
which the critics have set up. The critics have 
no furnace hotter than a modern gas stove into 
which, in imitation of Nebuchadnezzar, they 


*“Ten Years Digging in Egypt,” page 54, quoted by 
J. J. Lias in “Principles of Biblical Criticism.” 


“Impossibilities’ Become “Facts” 217 


may cast our faith. The lions with which 
they would terrify the unlearned are no more 
than overgrown mousers, fed from the table of 
Christianity, and grown a trifle defiant from 
being over-baited on mice caught among the 
Christian archives. They will do no harm to 
the Christian household, but will doubtless in 
the end serve some good use if left alone, except 
when they get into mischief. 

Commenting upon the results of Mr. Petrie’s 
excavations, a judicious writer has recently 
said, “So many of the impossibilities of the 
critics have turned out to be the facts of his- 
tory, that it were well to pause before admitting 
the force of any argument built on what is after 
all the basis of our (often very profound) ig- 
norance of the conditions of life in early 
times.” To the same purpose, and far more 
strongly, speaks Prof. Sayce: “Whenever the 
Biblical history comes in contact with that of 
its powerful neighbors, and thus can be tested 
by contemporaneous monuments of Egypt and 
Assyria-Babylonia, it is confirmed even in the 
smallest details.’” 

But it may be objected that some discoveries 
may yet be made showing errors in the Old 

6“Principles of Biblical Criticisms,” by Prof. J. J. 


Lias, page 258. 
TQuoted by Canon Talbot in “Our Bible,” page 18. 


218 Infinttesemal Corrections 


Testament! What then? The church will do 
what her Christianity enjoins upon her—ad- 
mit the truth. But we may be sure, in the light 
of past discoveries and in view of present ten- 
dencies, that the church will not in deference to 
truth be called upon to surrender any smallest 
shred of the body of divinely inspired teaching 
given to her from heaven for the redemption of 
earth. Minor modifications of interpretation 
she will make as facts well ascertained may re- 
quire. It may be possible that the Old Testa- 
ment, which Jesus authenticated, may have dif- 
fered in some slight particulars from that 
which we have. But the difference is infini- 
tesimal compared with the whole body of un- 
changed and unchangeable truth which we have 
inherited from the centuries past. 

Let us now inquire touching the preservation 
of the New Testament. We have seen how 
rapidly the manuscripts of the books of the 
New Testament were copied and circulated in 
the first centuries of the Christian era. We 
have seen how copiously the authors of the 
patristic writings quoted from them. Trans- 
lations were also made of them, the most nota- 
ble being those known as the “Vetus Latina” 
and ‘The Peshito,” neither of which can be 
later than the third century, and most probably 
belong to the second century. The “Vetus 


Codices and Versions 919 


Latina” was in use among the churches of 
North Africa, and the ‘“Peshito” was that used 
by the Syriac churches. The number of origi- 
nal Greek manuscripts which have been discov- 
ered is 1,583—127 (uncials) dating from the 
fourth to the tenth centuries, and 1,456 (cur- 
sives) dating from the tenth to the fifteenth 
centuries. There are, besides the “Vetus 
Latina” and the “Peshito,” many other ancient 
versions, known to New Testament critics. 
That such a vast body of ancient manuscripts 
and other authorities, preserving the New 
Testament text, have reached our times is won- 
derful. There is no extant manuscript of the 
Greek histories of Herodotus earlier than the 
ninth century. The manuscripts of Plato’s 
works do not go further back than the same 
date. Of the works of both Herodotus and 
Plato, there are less than thirty manuscript 
copies in existence. Scholars lament the irre- 
trievable loss of much of Livy’s writings. 
Much, also, that Tacitus wrote has been lost. 
It has so befallen, also, the works of Euripides, 
Aeschylus and Sophocles. The immense re- 
mains of the New Testament writers, com- 
pared with what is left of the writers of the 
classics, will appear the more remarkable when 
the persecutions of Decius and Diocletian are 
recalled—persecutions which were particularly 


220 Inherited from the Martyrs 


designed to destroy Christianity by destroying 
its Scriptures. The writings of Greece and 
Rome have perished in no such way. They 
were loved less and hated less because no one 
thought them the Word of God. But the early 
Christians held the books of the New Testament 
dear enough to die for them. The New Testa- 
ment books were to the early church what the 
Old Testament Scriptures were to the Jews, of 
whom Josephus says: “It is with all the Jews 
as it were an inborn conviction from their very 
earliest infancy to call their Scriptures God’s 
teachings, to abide in them, and if necessary to 
die joyfully in maintaining them.’* From 
similar heroism has come to us our rich in- 
heritance already found in the New Testament 
manuscripts. And it is not improbable that 
there are many valuable manuscripts yet to be 
discovered. One of the greatest known manu- 
scripts, the Codex Sinaiticus, was not secured by 
Professor Tischendorff and brought to the Im- 
perial Library, at Saint Petersburg, until 1859. 
Not until 1868 did Pius IX. allow the Codex 
Vaticanus to be published to the world. And 
the Codex Alexandrinus was sent to Charles I. 
by Cyril, the Patriarch of Constantinople, no 
longer ago than 1628. In this connection it 
should be said that it is a remarkable fact that 
®“Contra Apion,” Lib. I., page 1837. 


The Work of Erasmus 221 


each division of the Christian church holds one 
of these great and most valuable manuscripts. 
Protestant England holds the Codex Alexan- 
drinus in the British Museum, the Vatican Li- 
brary at Rome holds the Codex Vaticanus, and 
the Greek Church holds the Codex Sinaiticus 
in the Imperial Library at St. Petersburg. 
The Book can never be lost or corrupted any 
more. 

It is a remarkable fact, and germane to the dis- 
cussion we have in hand, that without these great 
manuscripts the learned Erasmus constructed, 
from such authorities as were in his reach, a 
text which is so nearly perfect that little revision 
has been required to conform it to the authori- 
ties subsequently discovered. Remarking upon 
this striking fact, the learned Dr. William 
Milligan, of Aberdeen, says: “Erasmus and 
his followers for a century had but a few mod- 
ern manuscripts which they could consult in 
preparing their editions of the New Testament. 
They were such as happened to be within their 
reach; and these were of a character on which 
no great reliance could be placed. To show 
how meager were the resources of Erasmus, it 
may be mentioned that he had only a single 
manuscript of the Apocalypse, and that even 
the one he possessed was not complete. A part 
of the New Testament would thus have been al- 


222 “A Providential Miracle’ 


together wanting in his first edition had he not 
ventured to supply it by translation from the 
Latin. He took the Vulgate and conjecturally 
translated it into Greek. It thus happens that 
in the ordinary editions of the Greek New Tes- 
tament there are words still existing which, so 
far from resting on any manuscript authority, 
or having any claim to be regarded as inspired, 
were plainly and confessedly inserted in the 
text from mere conjecture. Yet, notwithstand- 
ing this, the common Greek New Testament ex- 
cites our deepest wonder and admiration. We 
can not but regard it as a kind of Providential 
miracle. Although so much has been done 
since it was formed to throw light upon the true 
text of Scripture, that which was at first 
adopted. remains for all practical purposes to- 
tally unaffected. God has never interfered 
with human liberty, yet it is impossible to look 
back upon the history of the Bible, and espe- 
cially on the point now under consideration, 
without being struck with the manner in which 
he has continually watched over His own Holy 
Word. We may truly and thankfully say that 
he led Erasmus and his followers “in a way 
which they knew not,” so as to secure a substan- 
tial accuracy in those transcripts of the New 
Testament which they presented to the world.’”® 


°*“The Words of the New Testament,” by Milligan 
and Roberts, pages 73, 74, 


Substantial Purity of New Testament 223 


But if Erasmus could so accurately determ- 
ine the true text then, how much more cer- 
tainly may it be fixed by scholars of the present 
day, when the three Codices at London, Rome 
and St. Petersburg, and other noble witnesses, 
wholly unknown to Erasmus, stand up to point 
the way of devout investigators to the “truth 
as it is in Jesus.” We may confidently rest in 
the substantial correctness of the New Testa- 
ment. As the learned Tischendorff strikingly 
remarks, “Providence has ordered it so that the 
New Testament can appeal to a far larger num- 
ber of all kinds of original sources than the 
whole of the rest of ancient literature.” 

Verily, it has come to pass, as Jesus said it 
should be, when he declared that though the 
heavens and earth would pass away, neither the 
Old Testament nor His Words would pass 
away. The words of Moses and the prophets, 
of Christ and the Apostles, are in our hands. 
Here, as we have them before us and read 
them, we may think the thoughts of God after 
Him, and may find the way of eternal Life and 
Truth without danger of Error. Here is light, 
clear and certain. 

The Word of God has withstood the mad- 
ness of Antiochus, the fury of Diocletian, the 
hatred of Kings, and the rage of ecclesias- - 
tics. It will abide forever. The thousands 


224 “The Various Readings” 


and hundreds of thousands of the “various 
readings,” of which the critics talk so much, in 
nowise affect its purity. The various readings 
point to the multitude of copies made of the 
New Testament in the first century, and they 
will help to perfect the purity of the text used 
in the last century of the world’s history, when 
the New Testament will still be mankind’s 
great Teacher. They were the dust raised by 
the chariot wheels of Truth as it passed down 
the first centuries, and, by the alchemy of Prov- 
idence, instead of dimming the sacred page, 
they have turned to gold-leaf in our hands with 
which to illumine it. As the erudite Bentley 
has vigorously declared: “Make your thirty 
thousand as many more, if numbers of copies 
can ever reach that sum; all the better to a 
knowing and serious reader, who is thereby 
more richly furnished to select what he sees 
genuine. But even put them in the hands of a 
knave or a fool, he shall not extinguish the 
light of any one chapter, nor so disguise the 
truth of Christianity but that every feature 
of it shall still be the same.’”” 

The future holds no slightest danger to the 
Scriptures from discoveries in any possible di- 
rection. We have seen what the most careful 
research can do in the matter of revising the 


The ‘“‘various readings” were reckoned 30,000 then. 


The Future for the Book 225 


Book in the recently completed Revised Ver- 
sion. “The most diligent, long-continued 
search for errors, omissions and interpolations 
has brought to light nothing that affects the 
great facts of the Gospel or the doctrines that 
have formed the substance of the church’s faith 
and teaching from the beginning. The hate 
and persecutions, the clamors and controver- 
sies of the ages have failed to do serious dam- 
age to even the letter of the sacred text.” 

The future is all on the side of the Book. 
This is an age of exploration and discovery. 
Egypt and Assyria are giving up their dead. 
Babylon and Nineveh are waking from their 
long sleep to testify. Who shall say what treas- 
ures are hidden away in Constantinople and 
Rome? What manuscripts may not yet be un- 
earthed? We may be sure this divine light 
will not grow dim, but on the contrary shall be 
as the path of the just, “that shineth more and 
more unto the perfect day.” Wherefore the 
Christian church will encourage research, will 
welcome reverent criticism, will prove all 
things, will hold fast that which is good, and 
will walk in the light. 

Her loyal sons, not her enemies, are exploring 
the East. The past they feel is with the Book, 


“Witnesses to Christ,” by Bishop Alpheus W. Wil- 
son, page 239. 


15 


226 The Inving Christ Leads 


and they seek to unearth the hidden records of 
antiquity for its confirmation and exposition. 
The present is full of interest and the future is 
full of hope. The living Christ goes before His 
church. 


So long His truth hath blessed her, sure it still 
Will lead her on 

O’er moor and fen and crag and torrent till 
The night is gone. 

And with the morn His radiant face will smile, 

Who taught her long ago and left awhile. 


XI 


IS THE IMPRINT OF GOD UPON THE 
BOOK AUTHENTICATED BY JESUS? 
THE INTERNAL EVIDENCES OF THE 
DIVINE ORIGIN OF THE BIBLE. 


“All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is 
profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, 
for instruction in righteousness; that the man of 
God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all 
good works.’—St. Paul to Timothy. 


“The Scriptures have God for their author; eter- 
nity for their object; and truth without any mixture 
of error for their subject-matter.’”—John Locke. 


“You can not look at the Cathedral of Milan, whose 
first stone was laid in 1386, without instinctively 
knowing that it must have been the product of one 
mind, however many workmen may have helped to 
rear its marble walls and pinnacles. Its unity of 
design can not be the result of accident. No, the 
workmen were not the architect. Every stone was 
shaped and polished to fit its place in the plan. And 
so the Bible: that cathedral of the ages! Whoever 
the workmen were, the architect was God.”—A. T. 
Pierson, 


XIit 


Is tHE Imprint oF Gop Upon THE Boox 
AUTHENTICATED BY JESuS? Tue INTER- 
waL EvipENCES OF THE Divine ORIGIN OF 
THE BIBLE. 


Ir on the surface of the Universe we can dis- 
cover the footprints of God we ought surely to 
find his fingerprints upon a book purporting 
to come from Him. And such is the case. On 
the Bible is the impress of a divine hand. It 
contains internal evidences of its superhuman 
origin. 

A mere man can not so successfully mimic 
the divine voice and affect the divine manner 
as to play the role of a God before the world, 
and escape detection. Hence all man-made 
religions bear unmistakable marks of their hu- 
man authors. Their speech “betrayeth” them. 
They manifest on sight that they are “from 
beneath” the heavens. The imperfections and 
the impatience of man mar them. 

1. A universal fault with them is that they 
are full grown at birth, and thunder in such 
whimsical and grotesque portents as their authors 
vainly imagine become a revelation from God. 
This fact necessarily arises because they are 
the products of one man’s brain, or at best the 

229 


230 Miraculous U nity 


fabrication of a small circle of men. Moham- 
medanism sprang from Mahomet full orbed. 
Confucianism thus sprang from Confucius. 
But the Bible is composed of sixty-six books 
written by about thirty different men residing 
in Egypt, Arabia, Palestine, Greece, Assyria 
and Italy, and distributed over fifteen centuries. | 
And yet thus widely separated from each other 
in time and in space they produced a book of 
such unity and symmetry that it appears to be 
the work of one overshadowing Mind, and to 
have but a single Author. In what literature, 
ancient or modern, can such unity of form and 
sameness of purpose be found throughout the 
writings of thirty different men? Can sixty-six 
books be picked out of English or German or 
Latin or Greek literature, and bound together 
in one, and a book be thus constructed that will 
make such a single and indivisible impression 
as the Bible makes on the reader? 

2. The unity of this Book grows out of the 
fact that all its parts gather around a Person. 
Up to a certain point all the writers look for- 
ward to him, and after that the rest look back- 
ward to a peculiar era of history, and then they 
turn and look forward to the furthest point of 
the future from which they seem to see Him 
returning to them again. They who profess to 
have met him in the flesh and to report his say- 


The Imprint of Nature 231 


ings treat him as no pupils ever treated a Mas- 
ter. None of them envy him and none of them 
ever try to improve on his teachings. These 
things are not after the manner of man-made 
systems. 

3. When men undertake to manufacture 
religions their efforts are bounded by the hori- 
zon of earth. They can reflect only on the 
things which they observe around them, and the 
mental states which they feel within them. 
Hence, the systems which they manufacture 
of necessity bear the marks of the moulds in 
which they are shaped. The imprint of nature 
is upon them all. Nature is their problem 
and their master. But nature has various 
moods and an uninspired man, observing its 
smile to-day and its frown to-morrow, not un- 
naturally infers two gods, and with successive 
scenes passing before him he multiplies his 
deities to account for the variety of forces he 
sees playing about him. Hence, the dualism 
of Zoroaster and the polytheisms of most of the 
heathen nations. Or if he manages to escape 
the error of many gods, from the confusing con- 
tradictions around him he reaches the conclu- 
sion that there is no god, and becomes an athe- 
ist, or he decides that God is outside His crea- 
tion and can not get into it, after the manner 
of the ancient Gnostics or the Modern Deists; 


232 “An Unearthly Voice’ 


or he identifies God with everything, both good 
and evil, as do the Pantheists, who compound 
a sort of deific varnish out of the conception of 
omnipresence, and overlay the face of the uni- 
verse with it. But the voice of the Bible from 
Genesis to Revelation is the ery of Israel, 
“The Lord our God is one Lord.’ Before its 
light atheism, dualism, polytheism, deism and 
pantheism fly as mists before the rising gun. 
The voice of the Book is not the voice of one 
who interprets nature but it is an unearthly 
voice speaking to men from the upper world. 

4. For the same reason the Bible commits 
itself to no system of science, true or false. 
Moses, brought up doubtless to accept the hy- 
pothesis of the Ptolemaic system of Astronomy, 
never affirms it in his writings. Nor does he 
set forth by inspiration the Copernican system. 
If he had accepted the first, his books could not 
hold their place now. If he had adopted the 
second, his books would not have been believed 
in his own time. In miraculous silence he says 
nothing on the subject, and so there was faith in 
Israel wandering in the wilderness, and modern 
Christianity has had its Galileos, Keplers and 
Newtons. “Certainly it is astonishing that a 
narrative should be so constructed that without 
the slightest contortion it should be equally 
suitable to a time of ignorance and a time of 


———— Se 


————— OS! = 


Final Principles 233 


knowledge; should keep its place during thou- 
sands of years of astronomical error, and defy 
the assaults of its enemies during hundreds of 
years of astronomical truth; and should in an 
age of darkness on every subject of science lay 


‘the foundations of a universal religion which 


endures the scrutiny of an age of unexampled 
light.”” Science will never render the Bible 
obsolete, whatever the discoveries of the future 
may be, for it is not an exposition of the natural 
but a revelation of the supernatural. 

5. Moreover, all its religious truths and 
ethical principles are final. They fill the meas- 
ure of possible thought within the limits of that 
which is true. 

It shows God as a Father, and concerning 
God nothing can be conceived higher and nobler 
than Fatherhood. Herein it surpasses the Pan- 
theistic doctrines of the religions of India, and 
the paralyzing hypotheses of modern Material- 
ists. 

It teaches the brotherhood of man—a gener- 
ous, tender truth, than which there can be noth- 
ing wider. Herein it shows superiority to all 
the ethnic creeds of earth. 

It sets forth an ethical system so perfect that 
since its completion and publication not a new 


1“Reasons for Faith in the Nineteenth Century,” 
by John McDowell Leavitt, D.D., page 43. 


234  Infe and Immortality Revealed 


virtue has been conceived nor a new vice de: 
tected. Humility, poverty of spirit, forgiveness, 
forbearance, philanthropy, the love of enemies, 
self-denial and purity of heart, are excellencies 
revealed by it, and for which it had to clear 
standing room in the world, and which it has 
with difficulty maintained among men. In all 
the babbling tongues of earth there was no such 
word as philanthropy when Jesus taught, and 
“cross-bearing,” the loftiest self-sacrifice, draws 
its name from the instrument of his execution. 

It has not only revealed a perfect code of duty 
but it imparts an inspiration which enables men 
to practice the duties it enjoins. It is not a 
system of mere morals as Confucianism and the 
systems of the Stoics. It enjoins and imparts 
holiness of life, avoiding with the balance and 
poise of a life-forve both laxness of principle on 
the one hand and asceticism of conduct on the 
other. In the corruptest age of the world its 
followers shone as lights in a benighted land, 
so luminously that the sceptical historian Gib- 
bon could not overlook their “pure and austere 
morality.” 

Tts revelation of human destiny is as tran- 
scendent as its proclamation of human duty is 
fnal. As there is nothing higher than its doc- 
trine of divine fatherhood, nothing wider than 
its revelation of human brotherhood, nothing 


Not an Eclectic Philosophy 235 


purer and deeper than its requirements of per- 
sonal holiness, so also its doctrine of the resur- 
rection of the body and the life everlasting after 
death, more than meets all the desires implied 
by man’s brightest hopes. Wherefore since all 
its characteristic principles are final truths, no 
more by philosophy than by science can the 
world outgrow it. 

6. Furthermore, it is very remarkable that all 
these sublime truths should be found all together 
in one Book, and so combined as to exclude the 
idea that it is a mere eclecticism. It is not so 
with the Koran. It is not so with the philoso- 
phies of Greece and Rome. It is not so with 
the sacred books of India. This pure white 
light is from the Sun of Righteousness. 

7. And all these truths are set forth not as 
the conclusions of laborious and painful proc- 
esses of logical reasoning. They are uttered 
confidently. There is in the Book no such wav- 
ering and doubtful words as appear with Soc- 
rates and Plato longing for some “Word of 
God,” to guide them in the right way. Like 
its divine Master it speaks “as one having au- 
thority and not as the Scribes” of Judaism or 
Paganism, ancient or modern. Throughout 
the Bible there is the assured confidence of uni- 
versal empire over the minds of men. 

8. Closely akin to this quality of confident 


236 A Tranquil Face and a Divine Tone 


truthfulness it exhibits a style perfectly simple. 
In it there is nothing stilted or strained. Its 
writers seem never to think of rhetorical effects. 
Their powers of speech appear often to be bur- 
dened with the truths they present, as if human 
language were not able to bear the weight placed 
upon it, and would break beneath the strain. 
But there is never a trace of an effort to support 
feebleness of thought by excessive vigor of 
speech. The face of the Scriptures is tranquil 
as the face of nature, reflecting in serene depths 
the supernatural heights above. 

9. Withal, throughout the Book there is a 
pervasive voice charged with a divine tone. A 
tone is a thing too subtle for analysis, yet the 
dullest ear must catch the qualities of tender 
majesty, serious joyousness, and sacred hope- 
fulness, which sound through this superhuman 
Book. Its voice is that of a strong, noble, and 
tender Father walking in the haunts of way- 
ward children, calling them home. 

10. It brings to pass also, through its power 
of renovating personal character, the purifica- 
tion of social systems and national life. The 
nations which are composed of individuals who 
most sincerely follow its teachings are the dom- 
inant nations of the world, without regard to 
their place or to the numbers of people who 
compose them. Heathen nations, utterly or 


Pay, | 


The Source of Natural Strength 237 


nearly destitute of the Bible, are great obese 
organizations, stumbling to decay and death. 
Nations who are but partially penetrated by it 
exhibit conditions of weakness and strength 
exactly commensurate with the popular igno- 
rance or knowledge of the Bible among them. 
Thomas Carlyle, in discussing the French Rev- | 
olution, put this truth powerfully when he said: 
“The period of the Reformation was a Judg- 
ment Day for Europe, when all the nations were 
presented with an open Bible and all the eman- 
cipation of heart and intellect which an open Bi- 
ble involves. England, North Germany and oth- 
er powers accepted the boon, and they have been 
steadily growing in national greatness ever 
since. France rejected it; and in its place has 
had the gospel of Voltaire with all the anarchy, 
misery and bloodshed of those ceaseless revolu- 
tions of which that gospel is the parent.” The 
Roman Catholic nations, Italy, Spain, Austria, 
and Portugal, who also rejected the open Bible, 
retaining Romanism though refusing the doc- | 
trines of Voltaire, have fallen far behind the 
Northern Nations in the march of progress. 
On the Western Hemisphere the Roman Catho- 
lic countries, of Mexico, Central America, the 
West Indies and South America, know nothing 
of the prosperity and power of Canada and the 
United States, where the Bible is in every home. 


938 Theodore Parker’s Words 


All these striking imprints of the divine hand 
are thus summarized by Theodore Parker: 
“View it in what light we may, the Bible is 
a very surprising phenomenon. This collection 
of books has taken such a hold on the world as 
has no other. The literature of Greece, which 
goes up like incense from that land of temples 
and heroic deeds, has not half the influence of 
this book of a nation alike despised in ancient 
and modern times. In all the temples of Chris- 
tendom is its voice lifted up, week by week. The 
sun never sets on its gleaming page. It goes 
equally to the cottage of the plain man and the 
palace of the king. It is woven into the litera- 
ture of the scholar and it colors the talk of the 
street. .. . It blesses us when we are born; gives 
names to half Christendom; rejoices with us; 
has sympathy for our mournings; tempers our 
grief to finer issues. . .. Some thousand famous 
writers come up in this century to be forgotten 
in the next. But the silver cord of the Bible 
is never loosed nor its golden bowl broken, as 
Time chronicles his tens of centuries passed 
by. Has the human race gone mad? .. . Itis 
only a heart that can speak deep and true to a 
heart; a mind to a mind; a soul to a soul; wis- 
dom to the wise and religion to the pious. There 
must be in the Bible, mind, heart and soul, wis- 
dom and religion. Were it otherwise how 


Rousseau’s Confession 239 


could millions find it their lawgiver, friend and 
prophet? Some of the greatest of human insti- 
tutions seem built on the Bible; such things will 
not stand on heaps of chaff but on mountains of 
rock.” 

Is anything short of Inspiration an adequate 
explanation of the existence of such a book? 
Tf it were lost, and its teachings all forgotten 
could any one or all of the most intellectual, 
wise and learned men in all the earth make 
another book like it ? 

In answer to such questions said Rousseau: 
“T confess that the majesty of the Scriptures 
strikes me with admiration, as the purity of the 
Gospel has its influence on my heart. Peruse 
the works of our philosophers; with all their 
pomp of diction, how mean, how contemptible, 
are they compared with the Scriptures. Is it 
possible that a book at once so simple and. 
sublime should be merely the work of man? 
Is it possible that the sacred Personage whose 
history it contains should be himself a mere 
man ?... Shall we suppose the evangelic history 
amere fiction? Indeed, my friend, it bears not 
the marks of fiction; on the contrary, the history 
of Socrates, which nobody presumes to doubt, is 
not so well attested as that of Jesus Christ. 


2“Discourse of Religion,” Boston edition 1843, pages 
317-320. 


240 “The Book of God” 


Such a supposition in fact only shifts the diffi- 
culty without obviating it; it is more inconceiv- 
able that a number of persons should agree to 
write such a history than that one should fur- 
nish the subject of it. The Jewish authors 
were incapable of the diction and strangers to 
the morality contained in the Gospel; the 
marks of whose truth are so striking and inim- 
itable, that the inventor would be a more aston- 
ishing man than the hero.’” 

“The centuries come and go; times and sea: 
sons change; institutions rise and fall; civili: 
zations grow old and perish, but this Book liveth 
and abideth forever. It leads humanity onward 
and upward, and at each stage of progress 
points to better things to come. It is indeed 
a lamp unto the feet and a light unto the path 
of the toiling millions who seek to know that 
which is highest and best. What shall we say 
concerning such a marvelous volume? Is it 
not the Book of God.’” 

If it is not, there is not now, there never was, _ 
and there never will be, a book of God in our 
world. Its loss would be the greatest calamity 
that could befall mankind, as its universal ac- 
ceptance would be the greatest blessing. 

’Quoted in ‘“Watson’s Institutes,’ Part I., page 130. 


‘Rev. J. E. Gilbert in'an address published in “The 
Inspired Word,” page 207, 


XIV 
CONCLUSION. 


“Blessed is he that readeth and they that hear the 
words of this prophecy, and keep those things which 
are written therein.”—St. John in the Revelation. 


“I am a stranger in the earth; hide not thy com- 
mandments from me.’—Psalmist. 


“To the Bible men will return; and why? Be- 
cause they can not do without it. Because happiness 
is our being’s end and aim, and happiness belongs 
to righteousness, and righteousness is revealed in 
the Bible. For this simple reason, men will return 
to the Bible, just as a man who tried to give up 
food, thinking it was a vain thing, and he could do 
without it, would return to food; or a man who tried 
to give up sleep, thinking it was a vain thing, and 
he could do without it, would return to sleep.”— 
Matthew Arnold. 


“His Sermon on the Mount is unequalled, and 
whatever be the surprises of the future, Jesus will 
never be surpassed.”’—Renan. 


“Ag every man hath received the gift, even so min- 
ister the same one to another, as good stewards of the 
manifold grace of God.”—St. Peter. 


“T am debtor both to the Greeks and to the Bar- 
barians; both to the wise and the unwise.”—St, Paul. 


XIV 


ConcLusion. 


Our search is ended. Many of the evidences 
by which Christianity attests its divine author- 
ity at the bar of human reason have been 
passed in review before us. Logical processes 
applied to unquestionable facts and established 
~ testimonies have led us to conclusions in which 
reasonable minds can rest. We have seen that if 
the existence of God is assumed the logical pre- 
sumption of the hypothesis leads to belief in the 
existence of a divine revelation. The very 
conception of a God, considered in connection 
with the undying wants of mankind, forces the 
conclusion that if a God exists he has some- 
where and some-when granted to his sinful, 
suffering and bewildered child a revelation from 
above, and that such a revelation must be record- 
ed in the best form for constant appeal and per- 
petual preservation—a book. Turning then to 
seek evidences of the Divine Existence we have 
found footprints of Deity all over the entire 
surface of the universe. Advancing from the 
observation of the created universe to the con- 
sideration of human history, we have been con- 


vinced that if the God of nature has ever been 
243 


244 Our Quest and Our Find 


visibly manifest in Person among men he ap- 
peared in Jesus. In him we have discerned 
such superhuman features as forbid us to 
classify him with men. He was in the world 
but not of it. No imagination of man could 
have invented him, and nothing short of a di- 
vine personality could have maintained his sin- 
less nature, or have uttered his sublime words. 
We have followed him through his unparalleled 
life and have seen him laid in the sepulchre, 
only to rise again and establish in the world a 
faith and a church as unearthly as himself. 
We have found the history of all ages looking 
towards him as the eyes of servants look to the 
hand of their master. We have identified him 
as the Son of Man and lo! that very fact has 
shown him to be also the Son of God. We have 
come upon the books in which we anticipated 
the revelation of God would be found recorded 
somewhere in our world. We have discovered 
books attested and inspired by this divine Per- 
son. They have reached us from afar, it is 
true; but they have been preserved with unpar- 
alleled care and they have reached us substan- 
tially as they were when originally received by 
the men of old to whom they were first given. 
Through them we sit again, as did the ancients 
at the feet of the Attester and Inspirer of these 
books, astonished and enthralled by the gra- 


The Best Light Is Ours 945 


cious words which proceed out of his mouth. 
His words penetrate to the deepest depths of 
our souls, as if they were living and ominiscient 
beings before whom our secret thoughts were 
laid open and fully exposed to view. They fol- 
low us in whatsoever direction we move, like 
the eyes of a well wrought picture of Him. An 
unearthly light falls upon us from them. Un- 
der the influence of this light a new life within 
us springs up. Yielding to this light and trust- 
ing Him we lose the sense of guilt which has 
long been on us and the spell of sin is broken. 
The quality of the life we thus derive from him 
is as that which might pulsate to us from one 
who had been loosed from the pains of death 
because it was not possible that he should be 
holden of it. It seems to be of a deathless type. 
He becomes to us thus the hope of glory. He 
introduces us to a supramundane world. An- 
gels of prayer and peace ascend and descend 
upon Him. 

We have no hope of finding any other or any 
better light. This is the best revelation of God 
we can ever hope to obtain, unless He shall come 
again. What shall we do with it? 

First, let us dismiss our doubts and fears. 
We have found the truth; now let us accept it 
unfalteringly. We have not made this search 
for the pleasure of a mere excursion. Sincere 


946 Worth All the World Beside 


and serious minds can not seek truth in that 
spirit. He but trifles, boastfully, in vain and 
swelling words, who says: “Did the Almighty, 
holding in his right hand Truth and in his left 
Search After Truth, deign to proffer me the one 
I should request Search After Truth.” The 
quest for Truth is not the cruise of a pleasure 
boat but the voyage of a merchantman seeking 
goodly pearls until one be found worth all the 
world beside. It is such a treasure we have 
found in Him, “in whom are hid all the treas- 
ures of Wisdom and Knowledge.” (Colos- 
sians ii. 8.) He who came unto the world to 
bear witness to the Truth has given us the Liv- 
ing Truth. His words are final. “Christ no 
after age shall e’er outgrow.” 

Here we may rest secure and confident. 

But if any shall charge that we, desperately 
needing light, have been too ready to accept His 
guidance, that we have scrutinized His creden- 
tials with a too friendly eye, that upon insufh- 
cient evidence we have believed Him to be God, 
that too hastily we have received His words as 
a revelation from heaven, we reply, what better 
can we, or they, do? If not to Him, to whom 
shall we go for the words of Eternal life? If 
He is not God, and if He who is God has allow- 
ed this mighty and plausible deception of Chris- 

*Lessing. John Campbell Shairp. 


“Will Cleave to Him Alway” 247 


tianity to go so long unexposed—nay rather, has 
granted to it such providential confirmations 
—he can not blame us for falling victims to it. 
When therefore we shall come before Him in 
judgment he can not justly find fault with us 
for following Jesus and the Book—the best 
light our world ever had, or ever can hope to 
have. No speechless God of heartless, silent 
nature can upbraid us for being Christians. 
“Tf Jesus Christ is a man— 
And only a man—I say 


That of all mankind I cleave to Him, 
And to Him will I cleave alway. 


If Jesus Christ is a God— 
And the only God—I swear 

I will follow Him through heaven and hell, 
The earth, the sea and the air.”® 


Second, we must as speedily as possible give 
this truth to all other men. Our obligation to 
propagate the Truth is limited only by the num- 
ber of men in the world who need it, and by our 
ability to reach them with that Light which has 
come to us. The possession of a revelation by 
any man imposes upon him the most solemn 
obligation to give it to others. It would be a 
heartless God—an apotheosized monster—a 
deified Demon, who would leave such a creature 
as man in a world like ours without the very 


Richard Watson Gilder’s “Song of a Heathen So- 
journing in Galilee A. D. 32.” 


248 Deserves the Anathemas of the Race 


best light such a being could use. But we have 
seen that the best which can be done for man in 
the matter of a revelation is for God to reveal 
the truth to some men, and lay upon them the 
duty of carrying it to all other men. As there- 
fore the prophet who should suppress the in- 
spired words sent to him and choke them back 
in his throat, when other men were dying to 
hear them, would deserve the anathemas of the 
race, so also nigh unto cursing is that people 
to whom the word has come after the prophet 
has spoken it, but who refuse to pass it on to all 
who have not heard it! 

And how this dark inhumanity deepens in 
blackness when put in contrast alongside the 
revelation of ineffable love which has come to 
us in Christ. We have revealed before us a 
Crucified Saviour as the heart of history and 
the Lord of the Universe. Jesus has shown 
us the Father—yea, and revealed in Him 
depths of love, which the heart of man never im- 
agined were in the Father. The God of Nature 
in his kindliest moods never suggested that any 
room was left to man for repentance, or any 
place for forgiveness. This birthright of re- 
demption, which the unevangelized nations have 
bartered away for idols, and then have sought in 
vain to recover with bitter tears and bleeding 
sacrifices, the Voice of Nature declares to them 


a. 


The Supernatural Has Spoken 249 


is lost irreparably. But Jesus has come to us 
preaching the privilege of repentance and re- 
vealing the hope of pardon. In Him the Su- 
pernatural has spoken setting aside the decrees 
of the Natural. In Him we discover that the 
heart of the universe is not inflexible Power but 
redeeming Love. An inspired man has told 
us that ‘‘all things were created by Him and 
for Him.” (Colossians i. 16.) And the Apos- 
tle, who leaned on his bosom at the Supper, and 
who met him again in the weary days of the Pat- 
mos exile, has informed us that, “In the begin- 
ning was the Word and the Word was with God 
and the Word was God. The same was in the 
beginning with God. All things were made by 
Him; and without Him was not anything made 
that was made.” (John i. 1, 2, 3.) It was 
then his pierced hand that fashioned the world. 
Creative and Redemptive Love went out togeth- 
er with this Son of the Morning. But alas! 
men did not know it. “He was in the world, 
and the world was made by him, and the world 
knew him not.” The delirium of sin led 
men to mistake him for a Terror. And ah! 
how long the consuming fever has raged and the 
dark night has lingered, while some have watch- 
ed and waited with breaking hearts for His 
coming, as they who watch for the morning! 
But we know him, for his word came to us 


950 “Our Father's House at Last’ 


years ago, and he has been a long time with us. 
Shall we longer withhold from a dying world 
this Love Secret of the Skies? We sing: 


“T know thee Saviour, who thou art— 
Jesus, the feeble sinner’s friend; 
Nor wilt thou with the night depart, 
But stay and love me to the end. 
Thy mercies never shall remove, 
Thy nature and thy name is Love.’’ 


Wherefore O follower of the Christ, who is 
revealed in the Scriptures, wherever these lines 
overtake you, 


“TI say to thee, do thou repeat 
To the first man thou mayest meet 
In lane, highway, or open street,— 


That he, and we, and all men, move 
Under a canopy of love 
As broad as the blue sky above; 


That doubt and trouble, fear and pain 
And anguish, are all shadows vain, 
That death itself shall not remain; 


That weary deserts we may tread, 
A dreary labyrinth may thread, 
Through dark ways underground be led, 


Yet if we will our Guide obey 
The dreariest path, the darkest way 
Shall issue out in heavenly day; 


And we on divers shores now cast 
Shall meet, our perilous voyage past 
All in our Father’s house at last.’ 


“Charles Wesley’s “Wrestling Jacob.” 
’Richard Chenevix Trench’s “The Kingdom of God.” 


INDEX 


Andrews, President E. B., 
quoted on the covenant 
between Art, Literature, 


Science and_ Religion, 
173. 
Apocrypha never quoted 


by Christ, 153. 
Apologists—Older writers 
assume too much, while 
the modern writers con- 
cede too much, 3, 4. 
Arnold, Matthew, quoted, 
242. 
Augustine, St., quoted, 176. 


Bacon, 
30. 
Baur on the genuineness of 
the Epistles to the Gala- 
tians, Corinthians and 

Romans, 74. 

Beet, Dr. Joseph Agar— 
His ‘examination of the 
theory that the Resur- 
rection was a delusion, 
99-103. 

Ben Hur referred to, 193. 


Lord, quoted, 10, 


Bible: The only sacred 
book containing epistles, 
AS.) MOte sy, teary 


Briggs quoted concern- 
ing, 194, 195; His quo- 
tation examined, 195; 
Its purity uncorrupted, 
224; Its truths final, 
233; Not a system of 
science, 232; Carlyle on, 
237; Rousseau on, 239; 


Theodore Parker on, 
23s, 
Bismarck, Prince — His 


contest with Pius IX. 
referred to, 75. 
Bloody Sacrifices univer- 
sally believed in, 136. 
Briggs, Dr. C. A., quoted 


on inspiration of the 
Bible, 194, 195. 

Buckle, Thomas, quoted, 
206. 

Bushnell, Horace, on se- 


renity and patience of 
Jesus, 63, 64; on world 
changed by Jesus, 124, 
135, 147, 148. 


Cairns, Principal, on cen- 
tral position of the per- 
son of Christ, 7; on New 
Testament, 178. 

Carlyle, Thomas, 
Bible, 237. 

Cato quoted, 30. 

Chalmers, Dr. Thomas, on 
the hypothesis of a rev- 
elation, 12. 

Chambers, Dr. Talbot W.., 
on the Canon of the New 
Testament, 198. 

Channing, Dr. William E., 
on the character of 
Christ as a proof of di- 
vinity, 64. 

Christ: Key to the strug- 
gle between Faith and 
Doubt, 7; Character of, 
43; Lecky and Mill 


on the 


251 


252 


quoted concerning, 44; 
Horace Bushnell on, 45, 
61; Integrity of the 
character of, in the Gos- 
pels, 49; His superna- 
tural sayings, 49; Could 
not have been the prod- 
uct of His age, 51; Not 


the creation of the 
Evangelists, 52; His 
personal attitude  to- 
wards God and Man, 


Bushnell quoted concern- 
ing, 61; His humanity 
attests His divinity, 66; 
Supreme importance of 
His resurrection, 72, 73; 
Anticipated in history, 
literature and religion of 
the Hebrew nation, 129, 
139; The fulfillment of 
the past and hope of the 
future, 145; Exposing 
Error and_ defending 
Truth, 152; Attests the 
Old Testament, 153, 174. 
Christianity the only relig- 
ion which appeals to 
Reason, 11; Insists on 
the Reason, 11; Reason 
to be used reasonably in 
examining credentials of, 
12; Its credentials, not 
its contents, to be passed 
on, 12; Forces of, and 
their argument, Dot 
Prebendary Row’ on 
force of the argument 
from results of, 53; Ef- 
fects of, inexplicable un- 
less Christ has risen, 94, 
95; Claim of fulfilling 
the past peculiar to, 133. 


Index 


Clerk-Maxwell, Professor, 
on matter not Self-exist- 
ent and Eternal, 34. 

Clement of Alexandria, on 
genuineness of the Gos- 


pels, 111. 
Clement, of Rome, 114, 
119. 


Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 
quoted, 213. 

Critics, the Higher—Their 
view of “the intellectual 
fallibility” of Christ, 
169-171; An examina- 
tion of them, 171-174, 
214-218. 


Dale, DrooR.)" We “Phe 
Gospels can not be sub- 
stituted,” 117. 

Mes Tis banished God, 


Hllicott, Bishop C. J., on 
the Incarnation, 4. 
Emanuel, Victor—His en- 
trance into Rome, 75. 
Epistles, The: Value of, as 
historical documents, 76; 
Romans, Galatians, and 
Corinthians “uncontested 
and incontestable,” 74. 
Erasmus—His text of the 
New Testament, 221-223. 


Fernley Lecture, The 
(1889), on the Resur- 
rection, 99-108. 

Flint, Professor, on matter 
neither Hternal nor Self- 
existent, 34. 

Gaussen, Dr., quoted on 
inspiration of the Scrip- 
tures, 181-184; quoted, 


Index 


Gibbon—His inadequate 
explanation of the early 
success of Christianity 
examined, 95. 

Gilder, Richard Watson, 
quoted, 247. 

God: Three possible hy- 
potheses concerning, 19; 
Doctrine of His self- 
existence a necessity of 
Thought — Prof. Flint 
quoted, 35; As First 
Cause He must be a 
Free Cause, 36; Not in- 
termittent in His mani- 
festations, 129; Univer- 
sal belief in His exist- 
ence, 136; Plutarch 
quoted thereon, 136. 

Gospels, The Four: Ire- 
naeus, Clement of Alex- 
andria, Tertullian, Jus- 
tin Martyr, Papias, 
quoted on genuineness 
of, 118; Could not have 
been displaced by spu- 
rious gospels, 117, 118; 
Internal evidence of their 
inspiration, 118-121. 

Green, Dr. William Henry, 
on preservation of Old 
Testament, 212. 


Haygood, Bishop Atticus 
G., quoted on character 
of Christ, 51; on “myth- 
ical theory,” 53. 

Herschel, Sir John, quoted, 
208. 

History : Contemporaneous 
of the time of Christ, 
141, 142; Testimony of 


253 


modern to Christ, 148, 
145, 147, 148. 

Hodge, Dr. Charles, quo- 
ted, 176. 


Incarnation, The: Dis- 
cussed, 45; Established 
as a matter of fact, its 
possibility is not debat- 
able, 41; Hope of, uni- 
versal among all nations, 
136. 

Irenaeus on genuineness 
of the Gospels, 110. 


Jacobi quoted, 40. 


John the Baptist referred 
to, 141. 
Josephus, Flavius, on Old 


Testament, 177, 220. 
Justin Martyr on genuine- 
ness of the Gospels, 111. 


Leavitt, John McDowell, 
quoted, 2. 

Lecky, W. E. H., on the 
perfection of Jesus, 44; 
his explanation of the 
early triumph of Chris- 
tianity examined, 96. 

Lequinia quoted, 58. 

Lessing quoted, 246. 

Liss: Prof) J.. ds," ons the 
“Higher Critics,” 217; 
quoted, 208. 

Liddon, Canon H. P., on 
the probability of a rev- 
elation, 20; on self-ex- 
istence of God, 38; on 
sincerity of Christ, 66; 
his reply to Gibbon’s ex- 
planation of the early 
victories of Christian- 
ity, quoted, 18, 


254 


Literary Work, slow cir- 
culation of, before inven- 
tion of printing, 108. 

Locke, John, quoted, 228. 

Luthardt—His generaliza- 
tion on the mutual at- 
traction of God and 
Man, 136; quoted, 58. 

Luther, Martin, quoted, 
90. 


Matter and Mind: Three 
explanations of their ex- 
istence, 31; Origin of in 
time, 82, 34; Self-exist- 
ence of them unthinka- 
ble, 35. 

Mill, John Stuart, on the 
perfection of Jesus, 44. 

Milligan, Dr. William, con- 
cerning the New Testa- 
ment text of Erasmus, 
Ze Mien 

“Mythical Theory”: Preb- 
endary Row concerning, 
53; Bishop A. G. Hay- 
good on, 53; Dr. Henry 
Van Dyke on, 54, 55. 


Napoleon the Great—Tes- 
timony to Christ, 145- 
147. 

Neander on tone of New 
Testament writings, 205. 

Newman, John Henry, re- 
marked upon, 6. 

Newton, Sir Isaac, quoted, 
208. 

New Testament: Princi- 
pal Cairns concerning, 
178; Gaussen on neces- 
sity of, 181; Gaussen 
on authority, 184, 185; 


Index 


Canon of, is established 
by evidence and not fixed 
' by councils, 194-196; 
rapid circulation of its 
books in Apostolic age, 
196; “Apostolic Fath- 
ers” quoted concerning, 
199; Internal evidence 
of its inspiration, 205; 
Preserved not by miracle 
but by Providence, 211; 
Greek manuscripts of, 
219-221 ; Tischendorft 
quoted concerning, 223; 


Origen quoted concern- 
ing, 201. 


Old Testament: Divine 
authority of, attested by 
Jesus Christ, 149-174; 
Quoted by St. Peter at 
the Pentecost, 164; 
Quoted by the Martyr 
Stephen, 165; Testimony 
of Josephus to, 177-220; 
Guarded by Four Majes- 
tic Figures, 211. 

Origen quoted concerning 
the New Testament, 201. 


Pantheism—Its God “only 
a fine name for the unij- 


verse,” 21. 
Parker, Theodore, quoted 
concerning the _ Bible, 


238; quoted, 40. 
Pascal, Blaise—His Pen- 

seés referred to, 3; 

quoted, 10, 126, 151. 


Pierson, A. T., quoted, 
228. 
Pius IX.—Contest with 


Prince Bismarck, 75. 
Plutarch on the universal 


Index 


belief in the existence of 
God, 136; on Lycurgus, 
179. 


Quo Vadis referred to, 193. 


Reason, The: Limitations 
of, 13; May apply gen- 
eral tests of natural the- 
ology to a revelation, 15; 
The threefold office of, 
14. 

Renan, M., declares Epis- 
tles to the Romans, the 
Galatians and the Cor- 
inthians ‘uncontested 
and incontestable,” 74; 
quoted, 126, 242. 

Resurrection of Jesus: Su- 
preme importance of, 72, 

: 73; Argument for, drawn 
from KHpistles to the 
Romans, Galatians and 
Corinthians, 76-80; Al- 
ternatives concerning, 
80; These alternatives 
examined, 81-88; The 
Church reconstructed 
upon belief of it, 91; 
Forbids His classifica- 
tion with men, 151. 

Reuss, E.G. E., quoted, 150. 

Row, Prebendary C. A., 
quoted, 53, 70, 80. 


Sayce, Professor, on the 
“Higher Critics,” 217. 
Shairp, John, quoted, 246. 
South, Dr. Robert, quoted, 

106. 
Standpoint of this Work 
‘get forth, 8. 


255 


Summers, Dr. Thomas O., 
on necessity of a written 
revelation, 27; on testi- 
mony to the Canon of 
the New Testament 
found in the Patristic 
writings, 200, 201. 


Tatian — His 
ron,” 200. 
Tertullian on genuineness 
of the Gospels, 111. 

Tischendorff on New Tes- 
tament, 223. 

Trench, Richard C., quoted, 
250. 

Tyndale, William, quoted, 
166. 


“Diatessa- 


Van Dyke, Dr. Henry, on 
“Mythical theory,” 55. 


Van  Oosterzee quoted 
176. 
Visions: The “theory of 


visions” as set forth by 
Renan and others to ac- 
count for the belief in 
the Resurrection, 85; 
Conditions necessary to 
such hallucinations, 86. 


Wace, Rey. Henry, on the 
“Higher Critics,” 192. 
Watson, Richard, on hy- 
pothesis of a revelation, 

12. 


Wesley, Charles, quoted, 
250. 

Wilson, Bishop Alpheus 
W., on the Canon of 


New Testament not a 


miracle, 210; on the se- 
curity of the Bible, 225. 


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